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‘‘That sweet young blonde, who arrives by most trains.” 




URE, AND 
TCHES. 

.YELLS. 

TED . 


HOI 



[N AND COMPANY. 
W, Camfori&flc. 


“That sweet y 



Rodent <€la£sic$f 


A DAY’S PLEASURE, AND 
OTHER SKETCHES. 


By W. D. HOWELLS. 

II 


ILLUSTRATED . 



HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY. 
(£fre Htoerm&e <£amfju&0e. 

1881. 







CONTENTS. 


Page 

A DAY'S PLEASURE 7 

- BUYING A IIORSE 93 

'FLITTING 139 

'• THE MOUSE 167 

A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE . . .181 



















I. 

THE MORNING. 






* 





























I. 

THE MORN|NQ. 


ggjijfHEY were not a large family, and their 
pursuits and habits were very simple ; 
yet the summer was lapsing toward the 
first pathos of autumn before they found them- 
selves all in such case as to be able to take the 
day’s pleasure they had planned so long. They 
had agreed often and often that nothing could 
be more charming than an excursion down the 
Harbor, either to Gloucester, or to Naliant, or 
to Nantasket Beach, or to Hull and Hingham, 
or to any point within the fatal bound beyond 
which is seasickness. They had studied the 
steamboat advertisements, day after day, for a 
long time, without making up their minds which 
of these charming excursions would be the 
most delightful ; and when they had at last 


12 A DAY’S PLEASURE. 

fixed upon one and chosen some day for it, 
that day was sure to be heralded by a long 
train of obstacles, or it dawned upon weather 
that was simply impossible. Besides, in the 
suburbs, you are apt to sleep late, unless the 
solitary ice-wagon of the neighborhood makes 
a very uncommon rumbling in going by ; and 
I believe that the excursion was several times 
postponed by the tardy return of the pleasure rs 
from dreamland, which, after all, is not the 
worst resort, or the least interesting — or 
profitable, for the matter of that. But at last 
the great day came, — a blameless Thursday 
alike removed from the cares of washing and 
ironing days, and from the fatigues with which 
every week closes. One of the family chose 
deliberately to stay at home ; but the severest 
scrutiny could not detect a hindrance in the 
health or circumstances of any of the rest, and 
the weather was delicious. Everything, in 
fact, was so fair and so full of promise, that 
they could almost fancy a calamity of some sort 
hanging over its perfection, and possibly bred 
of it ; for 1 suppose that w*e never have anything 
made perfectly easy for us without a certain 
reluctance and foreboding. That morning they 
all got up so early that they had time to waste 


THE MORNING. 


13 


over breakfast before taking the 7.30 train for 
Boston ; and they naturally wasted so much of 
it that they reached the station only in season 
for the 8.00. But there is a difference between 
reaching the station and quietly taking the 
cars, especially if one of your company has 
been left at home, hoping to cut across and 
take the cars at a station which they reach 
some minutes later, and you, the head of the 
party, are obliged, at a loss of breath and per- 
sonal comfort and dignity, to run down to that 
station and see that the belated member has 
arrived there, and then hurry back to your own 
and embody the rest, with their accompanying 
hand-bags and wraps and sun-umbrellas, into 
some compact shape for removal into the cars, 
during the very scant minute that the train 
stops at Cliarlesbridge. Then when you are all 
aboard, and the tardy .member has been duly 
taken up at the next station, and you would be 
glad to spend the time in looking about on the 
familiar variety of life which every car presents 
in every train on every road in this vast Ameri- 
can world, you are oppressed and distracted 
by the cares which must attend the pleasure- 
seeker, and which the more thickly beset him 
the more deeply he plunges into enjoyment. 


n 


A DAY’S PLEASURE. 


I can learn very little from the note-book of 
the friend whose adventures I am relating in 
regard to the scenery of Somerville, and the 
region generally through which the railroad 
passes between Charlesbridge and Boston ; but 
so much knowledge of it may be safely assumed 
on the part of the reader as to relieve me of 
the grave responsibility of describing it. Still, 
I may say that it is not unpicturesque, and 
that I have a pleasure, which I hope the reader 
shares, in anything like salt meadows and all 
spaces subject to the tide, whether flooded by 
it or left bare with their saturated grasses by 
its going down. I think, also, there is some- 
thing fine in the many -roofed, many-chimneyed 
highlands of Chelsea (if it is Chelsea), as you 
draw near the railroad bridge, and there is a 
pretty stone church on a hillside there which 
lias the good fortune, so rare with modern 
architecture and so common with the old, of 
seeming a natural outgrowth of the spot where 
it stands, and which is as purely an object of 
aesthetic interest to me, who know nothing of 
its sect or doctrine, as any church in a picture 
could be ; and there is, also, the Marine Hos- 
pital on the heights (if it is the Marine Hos- 
pital), from which I hope the inmates can 


THE MORNING. 15 

behold the ocean, and exult in whatever misery 
keeps them ashore. 

But let me not so hasten over this part of 
my friend's journey as to omit all mention of 
the amphibious Irish houses which stand about 
on the low lands along the railroad-sides, and 
which you half expect to see plunge into the 
tidal mud of the neighborhood, with a series of 
hoarse croaks, as the train approaches. Per- 
haps twenty-four trains pass those houses every 
twenty -four hours, and it is a wonder that the 
inhabitants keep their interest in them, or have 
leisure to bestow upon any of them. Yet, as 
you dash along so bravely, yon can see that you 
arrest the occupations of all these villagers as 
by a kind of enchantment ; the children pause 
and turn their heads toward you from their 
mud-pies (to the production of which there is 
literally no limit in that region) ; the matron 
rests one parboiled hand on her hip, letting 
the other still linger listlessly upon the wash- 
board, while she lifts her eyes from the suds to 
look at you ; the boys, who all summer long 
are forever just going into the water or just 
coming out of it, cease their buttoning or un- 
buttoning ; the baby, which has been run after 
and caught and suitably posed, turns its an- 


16 


A DAY’S PLEASURE. 


guished eyes upon you, where also falls the 
mother’s gaze, while her descending palm is 
arrested in mid-air. I forbear to comment 
upon the surprising populousness of these vil- 
lages, where, in obedience to all the laws of 
health, the inhabitants ought to be wasting 
miserably away, but where they flourish in 
spite of them. Even Accident here seems to 
be robbed of half her malevolence ; and that 
baby (who will presently be chastised with 
terrific uproar) passes an infancy of intrepid 
enjoyment amidst the local perils, and is no 
more affected by the engines and the cars than 
by so many fretful hens with their attendant 
broods of chickens. 

When sometimes I long for the excitement 
and variety of travel, which, for no merit of 
mine, I knew in other days, I reproach myself, 
and silence all my repinings with some such 
question as, Where cotild you find more variety 
or greater excitement than abounds in and 
near the Eitchburg Depot when a train arrives ? 
And to tell the truth, there is something very 
inspiring in the fine eagerness with which all 
the passengers rise as soon as the locomotive 
begins to slow, and huddle forward to the door, 
in their impatience to get out; while the sup- 


THE MORNING. 


17 


pressed vehemence of the hackmen is also 
thrilling in its way, not to mention the instant 
clamor of the baggage-men as they read and 
repeat the numbers of the checks in strident 
tones. It would be ever so interesting to 
depict all these people, but it would require 
volumes for the work, and I reluctantly let 
them all pass out without a word, — all but 
that sweet young blonde who arrives by most 
trains, and who, putting up her eye-glass with 
a ravishing air, bewitchingly peers round among 
the bearded faces, with little tender looks of 
hope and trepidation, for the face which she 
wants, and which presently bursts through the 
circle of strange visages. The owner of the 
face then hurries forward to meet that sweet 
blonde, who gives him a little drooping hand 
as if it were a delicate flower she laid in his ; 
there is a brief mutual hesitation long enough 
merely for an electrical thrill to run from heart 
to heart through the clasping hands, and 
then he stoops toward her, and distractingly 
kisses her. And I say that there is no law of 
conscience or propriety worthy the name of 
law — barbarity, absurdity, call it rather — to 
prevent any one from availing himself of that 
providential near-sightedness, and beatifying 


18 A DAY’S PLEASURE. 

himself upon those lips, — nothing to prevent 
it but that young fellow, whom one might not, 
of course, care to provoke. 

Among the people who now rush forward 
and heap themselves into the two horse-cars 
and one omnibus, placed before the depot by a 
wise forethought for the public comfort to ac- 
commodate the train-load of two hundred pas- 
sengers, I always note a type that is both 
pleasing and interesting to me. It is a lady 
just passing middle life ; from her kindly eyes 
the envious crow, whose footprints are just 
traceable at their corners, has not yet drunk 
the brightness, but she looks just a thought 
sadly, if very serenely, from them. I know 
nothing in the world of her ; I may have seen 
her twice or a hundred times, but I must 
always be making bits of romances about her. 
That is she in faultless gray, with the neat 
leather bag in her lap, and a bouquet of the 
first autumnal blooms perched in her shapely 
hands, which are prettily yet substantially 
gloved in some sort of gauntlets. She can be 
easy and dignified, my dear middle-aged hero- 
ine, even in one of our horse-cars, where people 
are for the most part packed like cattle in a 
pen. She shows no trace of dust or fatigue 


THE MORNING. 


19 


from the thirty or forty miles which I choose 
to fancy she has ridden from the handsome 
elm-shaded New England town of five or ten 
thousand people, where I choose to think she 
lives. Erom a vague horticultural association 
with those gauntlets, as well as from the 
autumnal blooms, I take it she loves flowers, 
and gardens a good deal with her own hands, 
and keeps house-plants in the winter, and of 
course a canary. Her dress, neither rich nor 
vulgar, makes me believe her fortunes modest 
and not recent; her gentle face has just so 
much intellectual character as it is good to see 
in a woman’s face ; I suspect that she reads 
pretty regularly the new poems and histories, 
and I know that she is the life and soul of the 
local book-club. Is she married, or widowed, 
or one of the superfluous forty thousand? 
That is what I never can tell. But I think 
that most probably she is married, and that 
her husband is very much in business, and does 
not share so much as he respects her tastes. 
I have no particular reason for thinking that 
she has no children now, and that the sorrow 
for the one she lost so long ago has become 
only a pensive silence, which, however, a long 
summer twilight can yet deepen to tears 


20 A DAY’S PLEASURE. 

Upon my word ! Am I then one to give way 
to this sort of thing? Madam, I ask pardon. 

I have no fight to be sentimentalizing you. 
Yet your face is one to make people dream 
kind things of you, and I cannot keep my 
reveries away from it. 

But in the mean time I neglect the momen- 
tous history which I have proposed to write, 
and leave my day’s pleasurers to fade into the 
background of a fantastic portrait. The truth 
is, I cannot look without pain upon the dis- 
comforts which they suffer at this stage of their 
joyous enterprise. At the best, the portables 
of such a party are apt to be grievous embar- 
rassments : a package of shawls and parasols; 
and umbrellas and india-rubbers, howevg;*' 
neatly made up at first, quickly degenerates*- 1 
into a shapeless mass, which has finally to *be 
carried with as great tenderness as an ailing 
child ; and the lunch is pretty sure to overflow 
the hand-bags and to eddy about you in paper 
parcels ; while the bottle of claret, that bulges 
the side of one of the bags, and 

“That will show itself without / 5 

defying your attempts to look as if it were cold 
tea, gives a crushing touch of disreputability 


THE MORNING. 


21 


to tlie whole affair. Add to this the fact that 
but half the party have seats, and that the 
others have to sway and totter about the car 
in that sudden contact with all varieties of fel- 
low-men, to which we are accustomed in the 
cars, and you must allow that these poor merry- 
makers have reasons enough to rejoice fidien 
this part of their day’s pleasure is over. They 
are so plainly bent upon a sail down the Har- 
bor, that before they leave the car they become 
objects of public interest, and are at last made 
to give some account of themselves. 

“ Going for a sail, I presume ? ” says a 
person hitherto in conversation with the con- 
ductor. “ Well, I would n’t mind a sail my- 
self to-day.” 

“ Yes,” answers the head of the party, “ go- 
ing to Gloucester.” 

“ Guess not,” says, very coldly and decid- 
edly, one of the passengers, who is reading 
that morning’s “Advertiser”; and when the 
subject of this surmise looks at him for ex- 
planations, he adds, “The City Council has 
chartered the boat for to-day.” 

Upon this the excursionists fall into great 
dismay and bitterness, and upbraid the City 
Council, and wonder why last night’s “ Tran- 


22 A DAY’S PLEASURE. 

script ” said nothing about its oppressive ac- 
tion, and generally bewail their fate. But at 
last they resolve to go somewhere, and, being 
set down, they make up their warring minds 
upon Nahant, for the Nahant boat leaves the 
wharf nearest them ; and so they hurry away 
to India Wharf, amidst barrels and bales and 
boxes and hacks and trucks, with intermina- 
ble string-teams passing before them at every 
crossing. 

“ At any rate , 55 says the leader of the expe- 
dition, “we shall see the Gardens of Maolis, 
— those enchanted gardens which have fairly 
been advertised into my dreams, and where 
I ’ve been told / 5 he continues, with an effort to 
make the prospect an attractive one, yet not 
without a sense of the meagreness of the ma- 
terials, “they have a grotto and a wooden 
bull . 55 

Of course, there is no reason in nature why 
a wooden bull should be more pleasing than a 
ilesh-and-blood bull, but it seems to encourage 
the company, and they set off again with re- 
newed speed, and at last reach India Wharf 
in time to see the Nahant steamer packed full 
of excursionists, with a crowd of people still 
waiting to go aboard. It does not look in- 


THE MORNING. 


23 


viting, and they hesitate. In a minute or two 
their spirits sink so low that if they should see 
the wooden bull step out of a grotto on the 
deck of the steamer, the spectacle could not re- 
vive them. At that instant they think, with a 
surprising singleness, of Nantasket Beach, and 
the bright colors in which the Gardens of Ma- 
olis but now appeared fade away, and they 
seem to see themselves sauntering along the 
beautiful shore, while the white-crested break- 
ers crash upon the sand, and run up 

“ In tender-curving lines of creamy spray,” 

quite to the feet of that lotus-eating party. 

“ Nahant is all rocks,” says the leader to 
Aunt Melissa, who hears him with a sweet 
and tranquil patience, and who would enjoy 
or suffer anything with the same expression ; 
“ and as you ’ve never yet seen the open sea, 
it’s fortunate that we go to Nantasket, for, of 
course, a beach is more characteristic. But 
now the object is to get there. The boat will 
be starting in a few moments, and I doubt 
■whether we can walk it. How far is it,” 
he asks, turning toward a respectable-looking 
man, “ to Liverpool Wharf ? ” 

“Well, it 5 s consid’able ways,”*says the man, 
smiling. 


24 


A DAY’S PLEASURE. 


“ Then we must take a hack / 5 says the 
pleasurer to his party. “ Come on.” 

“ I ’ve got a hack,” observes the man, in a 
casual way, as if the fact might possibly in- 
terest. 

“ O, yon have, have yon ? Well, then, put 
us into it, and drive to Liverpool Wharf ; and 
hurry.” 

Either the distance was less than the hack- 
man fancied, or else he drove thither with un- 
heard-of speed, for two minutes later lie set 
them down on Liverpool Wharf. But swiftly 
as they had come the steamer had been even 
more prompt, and she now turned toward 
them a beautiful wake, as she pushed farther 
and farther out into the harbor. 

The hackman took his two dollars for his 
four passengers, and was rapidly mounting his 
box, — probably to avoid idle reproaches. 
“ Wait ! ” said the chief pleasurer. Then, 
“ When does the next boat leave ? ” he asked 
of the agent, who had emerged with a com- 
passionate face from the waiting-rooms on the 
wharf. 

“ At half past two.” 

“ And it’s^ now five minutes past nine,” 
moaned the merrymakers. 


THE MORNING. 


25 


“ Why, I ’ll tell you what you can do,” said 
the agent ; “ you can go to Hingham by the 
Old Colony cars, and so come back by the 
Hull and Hingham boat.” 

“ That ’s it ! chorused his listeners, “ we ’ll 
go”; and “Now,” said their spokesman to 
the driver, “ I dare say you did n’t know that 
Liverpool Wharf was so near; but I don’t 
think you ’ve earned your money, and you 
ought to take us on to the Old Colony Depot 
for half-fares at the most.” 

The driver looked pained, as if some small 
tatters and shreds of conscience were flapping 
uncomfortably about his otherwise dismantled 
spirit. Then he seemed to think of his wife 
and family, for he put on the air of a man 
who had already made great sacrifices, and “ I 
could n’t, really, I could n’t afford it,” said he ; 
and as the victims turned from him in disgust, 
he chirruped to his horses and drove off. 

“Well,” said the pleasurers, “we won’t 
give it up. We will have our day’s pleasure 
after all. But what can we do to kill five 
hours and a half? It’s miles away from 
everything, and, besides, there ’s nothing even 
if we were there.” At this image of their re- 
moteness and the inherent desolation of Bos- 


26 A DAY’S PLEASURE. 

ton they could not suppress some sighs, and in 
the mean time Aunt Melissa stepped into the 
waiting-room, which opened on the farther side 
upon the water, and sat contentedly down on 
one of the benches ; the rest, from sheer vacu- 
ity and irresolution, followed, and thus, with- 
out debate, it was settled that they should 
wait there till the boat left. The agent, who 
was a kind man, did what he could to alleviate 
the situation : he gave them each the adver- 
tisement of his line of boats, neatly printed 
upon a card, and then he went away. 

All this prospect of waiting would do well 
enough for the ladies of the party, but there 
is an impatience in the masculine fibre which 
does not brook the notion of such prolonged 
repose ; and the leader of the excursion pres- 
ently pretended an important errand up town, 
— nothing less, in fact, than to buy a tumbler 
out of which to drink their claret on the beach. 
A holiday is never like any other day to the 
man who takes it, and a festive halo seemed 
to enwrap the excursionist as he pushed on 
through the busy streets in the cool shadow 
of the vast granite palaces wherein the genius 
of business loves to house itself in this money- 
making land, and inhaled the odors of great 


THE MORNING. 


27 


heaps of leather and spices and dry goods as 
he passed the open doorways, — odors that 
mixed pleasantly with the smell of the freshly 
watered streets. When he stepped into a 
crockery store to make his purchase a sense of 
pleasure-taking did not fail him, and he fell 
naturally into talk with the clerk about the 
weather and such pastoral topics. Even when 
he reached the establishment where his own 
business days were passed some glamour 
seemed to be cast upon familiar objects. To 
the disenchanted eye all things were as they 
were on all other dullish days of summer, even 
to the accustomed bore leaning up against his 
favorite desk and transfixing his habitual vic- 
tim with his usual theme. Yet to the gaze of 
this pleasure-taker all was subtly changed, and 
he shook hands right and left as he entered, to 
the marked surprise of the objects of his effu- 
sion. He had merely come to get some news- 
papers to help pass away the long moments on 
the wharf, and when he had found these, he 
hurried back thither to hear what had hap- 
pened during his absence. 

It seemed that there had hardly ever been 
such an eventful period in the lives of the fam- 
ily before, and he listened to a minute account 


28 A DAY’S PLEASURE. 

of it from Cousin Lucy. “ You know, Frank,” 
says she, “ that Sallie’s one idea in life is to 
keep the baby from getting the whooping- 
cough, and I declare that these premises have 
done nothing but re-echo with the most dolo- 
rous whoops ever since you’ve been gone, so 
that at times, in my fear that Sallie would 
think 1 ’d been careless about the boy, I ’ve 
been ready to throw myself into the water, and 
nothing ’s prevented me but the doubt whether 
it would n’t be better to throw in the whoopers 
instead.” 

At this moment a pale little girl, with a face 
wan and sad through all its dirt, came and 
stood in the doorway nearest the baby, and in 
another instant she had burst into a whoop so 
terrific that, if she had meant to have his scalp 
next it could not have been more dreadful. 
Then she subsided into a deep and pathetic 
quiet, with that air peculiar to the victims of 
her disorder of having done nothing notice- 
able. But her outburst had set at work the 
mysterious machinery of half a dozen other 
whooping-coughers lurking about the building, 
and all unseen they wound themselves up with 
appalling rapidity, and in the utter silence 
which followed left one to think they had died 
at the climax. 


THE MORNING. 


29 


“ Why, it ’s a perfect whooping-cough fac- 
tory, this place,” cries Cousin Lucy in a des- 
peration. “ Go away, do, please, from the 
baby, you poor little dreadful object you,” she 
continues, turning upon the only visible opera- 
tive iii the establishment. “ Here, take this ” ; 
and she bribes her with a bit of sponge-cake, 
on which the child runs lightly off along the 
edge of the wharf. “ That 5 s been another of 
their projects for driving me wild,” says Cousin 
Lucy, — “ trying to take their own lives in a 
hundred ways before my face and eyes. Why 
will their mothers let them come here to play ? ” 
Really, they were very melancholy little fig- 
ures, and might have gone near to make one 
sad, even if they had not been constantly im- 
perilling their lives. Thailks to its being sum- 
mer-time, it did not much matter about the 
scantiness of their clothing, but their squalor 
was depressing, it seemed, even to themselves, 
for they were a mournful-looking set of chil- 
dren, and in their dangerous sports trifled si- 
lently and almost gloomily with death. There 
* were none of them above eight or nine years 
of age, and most of them had the care of 
smaller brothers, or even babes in arms, whom 
they were thus early inuring to the perils of 


30 A DAY’S PLEASURE. 

the situation. The boys were dressed in pan- 
taloons and shirts which no excess of rolling 
up in the legs and arms could make small 
enough, and the incorrigible too-bigness of 
which rendered the favorite amusements still 
more hazardous from their liability to trip and 
entangle the wearers. The little girls had on 
each a solitary garment, which hung about her 
gaunt person with antique severity of outline ; 
while the babies were multitudinously swathed 
in whatever fragments of dress could be tied 
or pinned or plastered on. Their faces were 
strikingly and almost ingeniously dirty, and 
their distractions among the coal-heaps and 
cord-wood constantly added to the variety 
and advantage of these effects. 

“Why do their mothers let them come 
here ? ” muses Trank aloud. “ Why, because 
it ’s so safe, Cousin Lucy. At home, you know, 
they ’d have to be playing upon the sills of 
fourth-floor windows, and here they ’re out of 
the way and can’t hurt themselves. Why, 
Cousin Lucy, this is their park, — their Pub- 
lic Garden, their Bois de Boulogne, their 
Cascine. And look at their gloomy little 
faces ! Are n’t they taking their pleasure in 
the spirit of the very highest fashion ? I was 


THE MORNING. 


31 


at Newport last summer, and saw the famous 
driving on the Avenue in those pony phaetons, 
dog-carts, and tubs, and three-story carriages 
with a pair of footmen perching like storks 
upon each gable, and I assure you that all 
those ornate and costly phantasms (it seems 
to me now like a sad, sweet vision) had just 
the expression of these poor children. We ’re 
taking a day’s pleasure ourselves, cousin, but 
nobody would know it from our looks. And 
has nothing but whooping-cough happened 
since I ’ve been gone ? ” 

“ Yes, we seem to be so cut off from every- 
day associations that I ’ve imagined myself a 
sort of tourist, and I ’ve been to that Catholic 
church over yonder, in hopes of seeing the 
Murillos and Raphaels ; but I found it locked 
up, and so I trudged back without a sight of 
the masterpieces. But what ’s the reason that 
all the shops hereabouts have nothing but 
luxuries for sale? The windows are perfect 
tropics of oranges, and lemons, and belated 
bananas, and tobacco, and peanuts.” 

“ Well, the poor really seem to use more of 
those luxuries than anybody else. I don’t 
blame them. I should n’t care for the neces- 
saries of life myself, if I found them so hard 
to get.” 


82 


A DAY’S PLEASURE. 


“When I came back here / 5 says Cousin 
Lucy, without heeding these flippant and heart- 
less words, “ I found an old gentleman who has 
something to do with the boats, and he sat 
down, as if it were a part of his business, and 
told me nearly the whole history of his life. 
Is n’t it nice of them, keeping an Autobiog- 
rapher? It makes the time pass so swiftly 
when you’re waiting. This old gentleman 
was born — who ’d ever -think it ? — up there 
in Pearl Street, where those pitiless big granite 
stores are now ; and, I don’t know why, but 
the idea of any human baby being born in 
Pearl Street seemed to me one of the saddest 
things I ’d ever heard of.” 

Here Cousin Lucy went to the rescue of 
the nurse and the baby, who had got into one 
of their periodical difficulties, and her inter- 
locutor turned to Aunt Melissa. 

“ I think, Franklin,” says Aunt Melissa, 
“ that it was wrong to let that nurse come and 
bring the baby.” 

“ Yes, I know, Aunty, you have those old- 
established ideas, and they’re very right,” 
answers her nephew ; “ but just consider how 
much she enjoys it, and how vastly the baby 
adds to the pleasure of this charming excur- 
sion f ” 


THE MORNING. 


33 


Aunt Melissa made no reply, but sat look- 
ing thoughtfully out upon the bay. “ I pre- 
sume you think the excursion is a failure,” 
she said, after a while ; “ but I 've been en- 
joying every minute of the time here. Of 
course, 1 've never seen the open sea, and I 
don't know about it, but I feel here just as if 
I were spending a day at the seaside.” 

“Well,” said her nephew, “I shouldn't 
call this exactly a watering-place. It lacks 
the splendor and gayety of Newport, in a cer- 
tain degree, and it has n’t the illustrious seclu- 
sion of Nahant. The surf is n’t very fine, nor 
the beach particularly adapted to bathing; 
and yet, I must confess, the outlook from 
here is as lovely as anything one need have.” 

And, to tell the truth, it was very pretty and 
interesting. The landward environment was 
as commonplace and mean as it could be : a 
yardful of dismal sheds for coal and lumber, 
and shanties for offices, with each office its 
safe and its desk, its whittled arm-chair and 
its spittoon, its fly that shooed not, but buzzed 
desperately against the grimy pane, which, if 
it had really had that boasted microscopic eye, 
it never would have mistaken for the unblem- 
ished daylight. Outside of this yard was the 


34 


A DAY’S PLEASURE. 


usual wharfish neighborhood, with its turmoil 
of trucks and carts and fleet express-wagons, 
its building up and pulling down, its discom- 
fort and clamor of every sort, and its shops 
for the sale, not only of those luxuries which 
Lucy had mentioned, but of such domestic 
refreshments as lemon-pie and hulled-corn. 

When, however, you turned your thoughts 
and eyes away from this aspect of it, and 
looked out upon the water, the neighborhood 
gloriously retrieved itself. There its poverty 
and vulgarity ceased; there its beauty and 
grace abounded. A light breeze ruffled the 
face of the bay, and the innumerable little sail- 
boats that dotted it took the sun and wind 
upon their wings, which they dipped almost 
into the sparkle of the water, and flew lightly 
hither and thither like gulls that loved the 
brine too well to rise wholly from it ; larger 
ships, farther or nearer, puffed or shrank their 
sails as they came and went on the errands of 
commerce, but always moved as if bent upon 
some dreamy affair of pleasure; the steam- 
boats that shot vehemently across their tran- 
quil courses seemed only gayer and vivider 
visions, but not more substantial; yonder, a 
black, sca-going steamer passed out between 


THE MORNING. 


35 


the far-off islands, and at last left in the sky- 
above those reveries of fortification, a whiff of 
sombre smoke, dark and unreal as a memory 
of battle ; to the right, on some line of rail- 
road, long-plumed trains arrived and departed 
like pictures passed through the slide of a 
magic-lantern; even a pile-driver, at work in 
the same direction, seemed to have no malice 
in the blows which, after a loud clucking, it 
dealt the pile, and one understood that it was 
mere conventional violence like that of a Punch 
to his baby. 

“ Why, what a lotus-eating life this is ! ” - 
said Prank, at last. “ Aunt Melissa, I don’t 
wonder you think it ’s like the seaside. It ’s a 
great deal better than the seaside. And now, 
just as we ’ve entered into the spirit of it, the 
time ’s up for the c Hose Standish ’ to come and 
bear us from its delights. When will the boat 
be in ? ” he asked of the Autobiographer, whom 
Lucy had pointed out to him. 

“Well, she’s hen in half an hour, now. 
There she lays, just outside the ‘John Ho- 
mer. ’ ” 

There, to be sure, she lay, and those pleas- 
ure-takers had been so lost in the rapture of 
waiting and the beauty of the scene as never 
to have noticed her arrival. 























% 




THE AFTERNOON. 







II. 

THE AFTERNOON. 

T is noticeable how many people there 
are in the world that seem bent always 
upon the same purpose of amusement 
or business as one’s self. If you keep quietly 
about your accustomed affairs, there are all 
your neighbors and acquaintance hard at it 
too ; if you go on a journey, choose what train 
you will, the cars are filled with travellers in 
your direction. You take a day’s pleasure, 
and everybody abandons his usual occupation 
to crowd upon your boat, whether it is to 
Gloucester, or Naliant, or to Nantasket Beach 
you go. It is very hard to believe that, from 
whatever channel of life you abstract yourself, 
still the great sum of it presses forward as be- 
fore : that business is carried oil though you 



40 


A DAY’S PLEASURE. 


are idle, that men amuse themselves though 
you toil, that every train is as crowded as that 
you travel on, that the theatre or the church 
fills its boxes or pews without you perfectly 
well. I suppose it would not be quite agree- 
able to believe all this ; the opposite illusion 
is far more flattering ; for if each one of us did 
not take the world with him now at every turn, 
should he not have to leave it behind him when 
he died ? And that, it must be owned, would 
not be agreeable, nor is the fact quite conceiv- 
able, though ever so many myriads in so many 
million years have proved it. 

When our friends first went aboard the 
“Hose Standish” that day they were almost 
the sole passengers, and they had a feeling 
of ownership and privacy which was pleasant 
enough in its way, but which they lost after- 
wards ; though to lose it was also pleasant, for 
enjoyment no more likes to be solitary than sin 
does, which is notoriously gregarious, and I 
dare say would hardly exist if it could not be 
committed in company. The preacher, indeed, 
little knows the comfortable sensation we have 
in being called fellow-sinners, and what an ef- 
fective shield for his guilt each makes of his 
neighbor’s hard-heartedness. 


THE AFTERNOON. 


41 


Cousin Frank never felt how strange was a 
lonely transgression till that day, when in the 
silence of the little cabin he took the bottle of 
claret from the hand-bag, and prepared to 
moisten the family lunch with it. “ I think, 
Aunt Melissa,” he said, “ we had better lunch 
now, for it ’s a quarter past two, and we shall 
not get to the beach before four. Let ’s impro- 
vise a beach of these chairs, and that water- 
urn yonder can stand for the breakers. Now, 
this is truly like Newport and Nahant,” he 
added, after the little arrangement was com- 
plete ; and he was about to strip away the 
bottle’s jacket of brown paper, when a lady 
much wrapped up came in, and, reclining upon 
one of the opposite seats, began to take them 
all in with a severe serenity of gaze that made 
them feel for a moment like a party of low for- 
eigners, — like a set of German atheists, say. 
Frank kept on the bottle’s paper jacket, and 
as the single tumbler of the party circled' from 
mouth to mouth, each of them tried to give the 
honest drink the false air of a medicinal potion 
of some sort ; and to see Aunt Melissa sipping 
it, no one could have put his hand on his heart 
and sworn it was not elderberry wine, at the 
worst. In spite of these efforts, they all knew 


42 


A DAY’S PLEASURE. 


that they had suffered a hopeless loss of re- 
pute ; yet* after the loss was confessed, I am 
not sure that they were not the gayer and hap- 
pier through this “ freedom of a broken law.” 
At any rate, the lunch passed off very merrily, 
and when they had put back the fragments of 
the feast into the bags, they went forward to 
the bow of the boat, to get good places for see- 
ing the various people as they came aboard, 
and for an outlook upon the bay when the boat 
should start. 

I suppose that these w T ere not very remark- 
able people, and that nothing but the indomi- 
table interest our friends took in the human 
race could have enabled them to feel any con- 
cern in their companions. It was, no doubt, 
just such a company as goes down to Nantas- 
ket Beach every pleasant day in summer. Cer- 
tain ones among them were distinguishable as 
sojourners at the beach, by an air of familiarity 
wdth the business of getting there, an indiffer- 
ence to the prospect, and an indefinable touch 
of superiority. These read their newspapers 
in quiet corners, or, if they were not of the 
newspaper sex, made themselves comfortable 
in the cabins, and looked about them at the 
other passengers with looks of lazy surprise. 


THE AFTERNOON. 


43 


and just a hint of scorn for their interest in 
the boat’s departure. Our day’s pleasurers 
took it that the lady whose steady gaze had re- 
duced them, when at lunch, to such a low ebb of 
shabbiness, was a regular boarder, at the least, 
in one of the beach hotels. A few other pas- 
sengers were, like themselves, mere idlers for a 
day, and were eager to see all that the boat 
or the voyage offered of novelty. There were 
clerks and men who had book-keeping written 
in a neat mercantile hand upon their faces, and 
who had evidently been given that afternoon 
for a breathing-time ; and there were strangers 
who were going down to the beach for the 
sake of the charming view of the harbor which 
the trip afforded. Here and there were people 
who were not to be classed with any certainty, 
— as a pale young man, handsome in his unde- 
sirable way, who looked like a steamboat pan- 
try-boy not yet risen to be bar-tender, but rap- 
idly rising, and who sat carefully balanced upon 
the railing of the boat, chatting with two young 
girls, who heard his broad sallies with contin- 
ual snickers, and interchanged saucy comments 
with that prompt up-and-coming manner which 
is so large a part of non-humorous humor, as 
Mr. Lowell calls it, and now and then pulled 


u 


A DAY’S PLEASURE. 


and pushed each other. It was a scene worth 
study, for in no other country could anything 
so bad have been without being vastly worse ; 
but here it was evident that there was nothing 
worse than you saw ; and, indeed, these per- 
sons formed a sort of relief to the other pas- 
sengers, who were nearly all monotonously 
well-behaved. Amongst a few there seemed 
to be acquaintance, but the far greater part 
were unknown to one another, and there were 
no words wasted by any one. I believe the 
English traveller who has taxed our nation 
with inquisitiveness for half a century is at last 
beginning to find out that we do not ask ques- 
tions because we have the still more vicious 
custom of not opening our mouths at all when 
with strangers. 

It was a good hour after our friends got 
aboard before the boat left her moorings, and 
then it was not without some secret dreads of 
sea-sickness that Aunt Melissa saw the seeth- 
ing brine widen between her and the familiar 
wharf-house, where she now seemed to have 
spent so large a part of her life. But the 
multitude of really charming and interesting 
objects that presently fell under her eye soon 
distracted her from those gloomy thoughts. 


THE AFTEltNOON. 


45 


There is always a shabbiness about the 
wharves of seaports ; but I must own that as 
soon as you get a reasonable distance from 
them in Boston, they turn wholly beautiful. 
They no longer present that imposing array of 
mighty ships which they could show in the 
days of Consul Plancus, when the commerce 
of the world sought chiefly our port, yet the 
docks are still filled with the modester kinds of 
shipping, and if there is not that wilderness of 
spars and rigging which you see aj; New York, 
let us believe that there is an aspect of selec- 
tion and refinement in the scene, so that one 
should describe it, not as a forest, but, less 
conventionally, as a gentleman’s park of masts. 
The steamships of many coastwise freight lines 
gloom, with their black, capacious hulks, 
among the lighter sailing-craft, and among the 
white, green-shuttered passenger-boats ; and 
behind them those desperate and grimy sheds 
assume a picturesqueness, their sagging roofs 
and crooked gables harmonizing agreeably with 
the shipping; and then growing up from all 
rises the mellow-tinted brick-built city, roof, 
and spire, and dome, — a fair and noble sight, 
indeed, and one not surpassed for a certain 
quiet and cleanly beauty by any .that I know. 


46 


A DAY’S PLEASU11E. 


Our friends lingered long upon this pretty 
prospect, and, as inland people of light heart 
and easy fancy will, the ladies made imagined 
voyages in each of the more notable vessels 
they passed, — all cheap and safe trips, occupy- 
ing half a second apiece. Then they came 
forward to the bow, that they might not lose 
any part of the harbor’s beauty and variety, 
and informed themselves of the names of each 
of the fortressed islands as they passed, and 
forgot them, being passed, so that to this day 
Aunt Melissa has the Fort Warren rebel prison- 
ers languishing in Fort Independence. But 
they made sure of the air of soft repose that 
hung about each, of that exquisite military 
neatness which distinguishes them, and which 
went to Aunt Melissa’s housekeeping heart, of 
the green, thick turf covering the escarpments, 
of the great guns loafing on the crests of the 
ramparts and looking out over the water 
sleepily, of the sentries pacing slowly up and 
down with their gleaming muskets. 

“ I never see one of those fellows,” says 
Cousin Frank, “without setting him to the 
music of that saddest and subtlest of Heine’s 
poems. You know it, Lucy ” ; and lie re- 
peats : — 


THE AFTERNOON. 


47 


“Mein Herz, mein Herz ist traurig, 

Doch lustig leuchtet der Mai ; 

Ich stehe gelehnt an der Linde 
Hoch auf der alten Bastei. 

“ Am alten granen Thurme 

Ein Schilderhauschen steht ; 

Ein rothgerockter Bnrsclie 
Dort auf und nieder geht. 

“ Er spielt mit seiner Flinte, 

Sie funkelt im Sonnenroth, 

Er prasentirt, und schultert, — 

Ich. wollt’, er schosse mich todt.” 

“ Oh ! ” says Cousin Lucy, either because 
the poignant melancholy of the sentiment has 
suddenly pierced her, or because she does not 
quite understand the German, — you never can 
tell about women. While Frank smiles down 
upon her in this amiable doubt, their party is 
approached by the tipsy man who lias been 
making the excursion so merry for the other 
passengers, in spite of the fact that there is 
very much to make one sad in him. He is an 
old man, sweltering in rusty black, a two days’ 
gray beard, and a narrow-brimmed, livid silk 
hat, set well back upon the nape of his neck. 


48 


A DAY’S PLEASURE. 


He explains to our friends, as he does to every 
one whose acquaintance he makes, that he was 
in former days a seafaring man, and that he 
has brought his two little grandsons here to 
show them something about a ship ; and the 
poor old soul helplessly saturates his phrase 
with the rankest profanity. The boys are 
somewhat amused by their grandsire’s state, 
being no doubt familiar with it ; but a very 
grim -looking old lady who sits against the 
pilot-house and keeps a sharp eye upon all 
three, and who is also doubtless familiar 
with the unhappy spectacle, seems not to find 
it a joke. Her stout matronly umbrella trem- 
bles in her hand when her husband draws 
near, and her eye flashes ; but he gives her as 
wide a berth as he can, returning her glare 
with a propitiatory drunken smile and a wink 
to the passengers to let them into the fun. In 
fact, he is full of humor in his tipsy way, and 
one after another falls the prey of his free 
sarcasm, which does not spare the boat or any 
feature of the excursion. He holds for a long 
time, by swiftly successive stories of his sea- 
faring days, a very quiet gentleman, who dares 
neither laugh too loudly nor show indifference 
for fear of rousing that terrible wit at his ex- 


THE AFTERNOON. 


49 


pense, and finds his account in looking down 
at his boots. 

“ Well, sir,” says the deplorable old sinner, 
“ we was forty days out from Liverpool, with 
a cargo of salt and iron, and we got caught on 
the Banks in a calm. c Cap’n,’ says I, — I ’us 
sec’n’ mate, — £ ’s they any man aboard this 
ship knows how to pray?’ £ No,’ says the 
cap’n; £ blast yer prayers!’ £ Well,’ says I, 
£ cap’n, I ’m no hand at all to pray, but I ’m 
goin’ to see if prayin’ won’t git us out ’n this.’ 
And I down on my knees, and I made a first- 
class prayer ; and a breeze sprung up in a 
minute and carried us smack into Boston. 

At this bit of truculent burlesque the quiet 
man made a bold push, and walked away with 
a somewhat sickened face, and as no one now 
intervened between them, the inebriate laid a 
familiar hand upon Cousin Frank’s collar, and 
said with a wink at his late listener : ££ Looks 
like a lerigious man, don’t he ? I guess I give 
him a good dose, if he does think himself the 
head-deacon of this boat.” And he went on to 
state his ideas of religion, from which it seemed 
that he was a person of the most advanced 
thinking, and believed in nothing worth men- 
tioning. 


50 


A DAY’S PLEASURE. 


It is perhaps no worse for an Infidel to be 
drunk than a Christian, but my friend found 
this tipsy blasphemer’s case so revolting, that 
he went to the hand-bag, took out the empty 
claret-bottle, and seeking a ' solitary corner of 
the boat, cast the bottle into the water, and 
felt a thrill of uncommon self-approval as this 
scapecoat of all the wine at his grocer’s bobbed 
off upon the little waves. “ Besides, it saves 
carrying the bottle home,” he thought, not 
without a half-conscious reserve, that if his 
penitence were ever too much for him, he could 
easily abandon it. And without the reflection 
that the gate is always open behind him, who 
could consent to enter upon any course of per- 
fect behavior ? If good resolutions could not 
be broken, who would ever have the courage 
to form them? Would it not be intolerable 
to be made as good as we ought to be ? Then, 
admirable reader, thank Heaven even for your 
lapses, since it is so wholesome and saving 
to be well ashamed of yourself, from time to 
time. 

“ What an outrage,” said Cousin Trank, in 
the glow of virtue, as he rejoined the ladies, 
“ that that tipsy rascal should be allowed to 
go on with his ribaldry. He seems to pervade 


THE AFTERNOON. 


51 


the whole boat, and to subject everybody to 
his sway. He *s a perfect despot to us help- 
less sober people, — I would n ’t openly disa- 
gree with him on any account. We ought to 
send a Round Robin to the captain, and ask 
him to put that religious liberal in irons dur- 
ing the rest of the voyage.” 

In the mean time, however, the object of his 
indignation had used up all the conversable 
material in that part of the boat, and had de- 
viously started for the other end. The elderly 
woman with the umbrella rose and followed 
him, somewhat wearily, and with a sadness 
that appeared more in her movement than in 
her face ; and as the two went down the cabin, 
did the comical affair look, after all, something 
like tragedy ? My reader, who expects a little 
novelty in tragedy, and not these stale and 
common effects, will never think so. 

“ You T1 not pretend, Frank,” says Lucy, 
“ that in such an intellectual place as Boston 
a crowd as large as this can be got together, 
and no distinguished literary people in it. I 
know r there are some notables aboard : do point 
them out to me. Pretty near everybody has a 
literary look.” 

“ Why, that ’s what we call our Boston look, 


5 2 


A DAY’S PLEASURE. 


Cousin Lucy. You need n’t have written any- 
thing to have it, — it ’s as general as tuber- 
cular consumption, and is the effect of our 
universal culture and habits of reading. I heard 
a New-Yorker say once that if you went into a 
corner grocery in Boston to buy a codfish, the 
man would ask you how you liked f Lucile,’ 
whilst he was tying it up. No, no; you 
must n’t be taken in by that literary look ; I ’m 
afraid the real literary men don’t always have 
it. But I do see a literary man aboard yon- 
der,” he added, craning his neck to one side, 
and then furtively pointing, — “ the most liter- 
ary man I ever knew, one of the most literary 
men that ever lived. His whole existence is 
really bound up in books ; he never talks of 
anything else, and never thinks of anytl^ng 
else, I believe. Look at him, — what kmd 
and pleasant eyes he ’s got ! There, he sees 
me!” cries Cousin Frank, with a pleasurable 
excitement. “ How d’ ye do ? ” he calls out. 

“ 0 Cousin Frank, introduce us,” sighs 
Lucy. 

“Not I ! He would n’t thank me. He 
does n’t care for pretty girls outside of books ; 
he ’d be afraid of ’em ; he ’s the bashfullest man 
alive, and all his heroines are fifty years old, at 


THE AFTERNOON. 


53 


the least. But before I go any further, tell me 
solemnly, Lucy, you ’re not interviewing me P 
You ’re not going to write it to a New York 
newspaper? No ? Well, I think it’s best to 
ask, always. Our friend there — lie’s every- 
body’s friend, if you mean nobody’s enemy, by 
that, not even his own — is really what I say, 
— the most literary man I ever knew. He 
loves all epochs and phases of literature, but 
his passion is the Charles Lamb period and all 
Lamb’s friends. He loves them as if they 
were living men ; and Lamb would have loved 
him if he could have known him. He speaks 
rapidly, and rather indistinctly, and when you 
meet him and say Good day and you suppose 
he answers with something about the weather, 
ten to one he’s asking you what you think 
of ftazlitt’s essays on Shakespeare, or Leigh 
Hunt’s Italian Poets, or Lamb’s roast pig, or 
Barry Cornwall’s songs. He could n’t get by 
a bookstall without stopping — for half an 
hour, at any rate. He knows just when all 
the new books in town are to be published, 
and when each bookseller is to get his invoice 
of old English books. He has no particular 
address, but if you leave your card for him 
at any bookstore in Boston, he ’s sure to get 


54 


A DAY’S PLEASURE. 


it within two days ; and in the summer-time 
yon ’re apt to meet him on these excursions. 
Of course, he writes about books, and very 
tastefully and modestly; there’s hardly any of 
the brand-new immortal English poets, who 
die off so rapidly, but has had a good word 
from him ; but his heart is with the older fel- 
lows, from Chaucer down; and, after the 
Charles Lamb epoch, I don’t know whether 
he loves better the Elizabethan age or that of 
Queen Anne. Think of him making me stop 
the other day at a bookstall, and read through 
an essay out of the “ Spectator ” ! I did it 
all for love of him, though money couldn’t 
have persuaded me that I had time ; and I ’m 
always telling him lies, and pretending to be 
as well acquainted as he is with authors I 
hardly know by name, — he seems so fondly 
to expect it. He ’s really almost a disembodied 
spirit as concerns most mundane interests ; his 
soul is in literature, as a lover’s in his mis- 
tress’s beauty ; and in the next world, where, 
as the Swedenborgians believe, spirits seen at 
a distance appear like the things they most re- 
semble in disposition, as doves, hawks, goats, 
lambs, swine, and so on, I ’m sure that I shall 
see his true and kindly soul in the guise of a 


THE AFTERNOON. 


55 


noble old Folio, quaintly lettered across bis 
back in old English text, Tom. I” 

While our friends talked and looked about 

them, a sudden change had come over the 
brightness and warmth of the day ; the blue 
heaven had turned a chilly gray, and the water 
looked harsh and cold. Now, too, they noted 
that they were drawing near a wooden pier 
built into the water, and that they had been 
winding about in a crooked channel between 
muddy shallows, and that their course was 
overrun with long, dishevelled sea-weed. The 
shawls had been unstrapped, and the ladies 
made comfortable in them. 

“ Ho for the beach ! ” cried Cousin Frank, 
with a vehement show of enthusiasm. “ Now, 

then. Aunt Melissa, prepare for the great enjoy- 
ment of the day. In a few moments we shall 
be of the elves 

£ That on the sand with printless foot 
Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him 
When he comes back.’ 

Come ! we shall have three hours on the beach, 
and that will bring us well into the cool of the 
evening, and we can return by the last boat.” 
“As to the cool of the evening,” said Aunt 


56 


A DAY’S PLEASURE. 


Melissa, “ I don’t know. It ’s quite cool 
enough for comfort at present, and I ’m sure 
that anything more would n’t be wholesome. 
What’s become of our beautiful weather?” 
she asked, deeply plotting to gain time. 

“ It ’s one of our Boston peculiarities, not 
to say merits,” answered Frank, “which you 
must have noticed already, that we can get 
rid of a fine day sooner than any other region. 
While you ’re saying how lovely it is, a subtle 
change is wrought, and under skies still blue 
and a sun still warm the keen spirit of the 
east- wind pierces every nerve, and all the fine 
weather within you is chilled and extinguished. 
The gray atmosphere follows, but the day first 
languishes in yourself. But for this, life in 
Boston would be insupportably perfect, if this 
is indeed a drawback. You ’d find Bostonians 
to defend it, I dare say. But this is n’t a reg- 
ular east- wind to-day ; it ’s merely our near- 
ness to the sea.” 

“I think, Franklin,” said Aunt Melissa, 
“ that we won’t go down to the beach this 
afternoon,” as if she had been there yesterday, 
and would go to-morrow. “ It ’s too late in 
the day ; and it would n’t be good for the 
child, I’m sure.” 


THE AFTERNOON. 


57 


“ Well, aunty, it was you determined us to 
wait for the boat, and it ’s your right to say 
whether we shall leave it or not. I ’m very 
willing not to .go ashore. I always find that, 
after working up to an object with great effort, 
it ’s surpassingly sweet to leave it unaccom- 
plished at last. Then it remains forever in 
the region of the ideal, amongst the songs that 
never were sung, the pictures that never were 
painted. Why, in fact, should we force this 
pleasure? We’ve eaten our lunch, we’ve 
lost the warm heart of the day ; why should 
we poorly drag over to that damp and sullen 
beach, where we should find three hours very 
long, when by going back now we can keep 
intact that glorious image of a day by the sea 
which we ’ve been cherishing all summer ? 
You ’re right. Aunt Melissa ; we won’t go 
ashore ; we will stay here, and respect our 
illusions.” 

At heart, perhaps, Lucy did not quite like this 
retreat ; it was not in harmony with the youth- 
ful spirit of her sex, but she reflected that she 
could come again, — 0 beneficent cheat of 
Another Time, how much thou sparest us in 
our over- worked, over-enjoyed world ! — she 
was very comfortable where she was, in a seat 


58 


A DAY’S PLEASURE . 


commanding a perfect view for the return trip ; 
and she submitted without a murmur. Be- 
sides, now that the boat had drawn up to the 
pier, and discharged part of her passengers, and 
was waiting to take on others, Lucy was inter- 
ested in a mass of fluttering dresses and wide- 
rimmed straw hats that drew down toward the 
“ Rose Standish,” and gracefully thronged the 
pier, and prettily hesitated about, and finally 
came aboard with laughter and little false cries 
of terror, attended through all by the New 
England disproportion of that sex which is so 
foolish when it is silly. It was a large picnic 
party which had been spending the day upon 
the beach, as each of the ladies showed in her 
face, where, if the roses upon her cheeks were 
somewhat obscured by the imbrowning seaside 
sun, a bright pink had been compensatingly 
bestowed upon the point of her nose. A mys- 
terious quiet fell upon them all when they 
were got aboard and had taken conspicuous 
places, which was accounted for presently 
when a loud shout was heard from the shore, 
and a man beside an ambulant photographic 
machine was seen wildly waving his hat. It 
is impossible to resist a temptation of this kind, 
and our party all yielded, and posed them- 


THE A FT E UNO ON. 


59 


selves in striking and characteristic attitudes, 
even Aunt Melissa sharing the ambition to 
appear in a picture which she should never 
see, and the nurse coming out strong from the 
abeyance in which she had been held, and 
lifting the baby high into the air for a good 
likeness. The frantic gesticulator on the 
shore gave an impressive wave with both hands, 
took the cap from the instrument, turned his 
back, as photographers always do, with that 
air of hiding their tears, for the brief space 
that seems so long, and then clapped on the 
cap again, while a great sigh of relief went up 
from the whole boat-load of passengers. They 
were taken. 

But the interval had been a luckless one for 
the “Rose Stan dish,” and wdien she stirred 
her wheels, clouds of mud rose to the top of 
the w r ater, and there was no responsive move- 
ment of the boat. She w T as aground in the 
falling tide. 

“ There seems a pretty fair prospect of our 
spending some time here, after all,” said 
Trank, while the ladies, who had reluctantly 
given up the idea of staying, were now in a 
quiver of impatience to be off. The picnic was 
shifted from side to side ; the engine groaned 


60 


A DAY’S PLEASUltE. 


and tugged. Captain Miles Standisli and his 
crew bestirred themselves vigorously, and at 
last the boat swung loose, and strode down 
the sea- weedy channels; while our friends, 
who had already done the great sights of the 
harbor, now settled themselves to the enjoy- 
ment of its minor traits and beauties. Here 
and there they passed small parties on the 
shore, which, with their yachts anchored near, 
or their boats drawn up from the water, were 
cooking an out-door meal by a fire that burned 
bright red upon the sands in the late afternoon 
air. In such cases, people willingly indulge 
themselves in saluting whatever craft goes by, 
and the ladies of these small picnics, as they 
sat round the fires, kept up a great waving 
of handkerchiefs, and sometimes cheered the 
“ Rose Standish,” though I believe the Bos- 
tonians are ordinarily not a demonstrative, 
race. Of course, the large picnic on board 
fluttered multitudinous handkerchiefs in re- 
sponse, both to these people ashore and to 
those who hailed them from vessels which they 
met. They did not refuse the politeness even 
to the passengers on a rival boat when she 
passed them, though at heart they must have 
felt some natural pangs at being passed. The 


THE AFTERNOON. 


Cl 


water was peopled everywhere by all sorts of 
sail lagging slowly homeward in the light even- 
ing breeze ; and on some of the larger vessels 
there were family groups to be seen, and a 
graceful smoke, suggestive of supper, curled 
from the cook’s galley. I suppose these ships 
were chiefly coasting craft, of one kind or 
another, come from the Provinces at farthest ; 
but to the ignorance and the fancy of our 
friends, they arrived from all remote and ro- 
mantic parts of the world, — from India, from 
China, and from the South Seas, with cargoes 
of spices and gums and tropical fruits ; and I 
see no reason why one should ever deny him- 
self the easy pleasure they felt in painting the 
unknown in such lively hues. The truth is, a 
strange ship, if you will let her, always brings 
you precious freight, always arrives from 
Wonderland under the command of Captain 
Sindbad. How like a beautiful sprite she looks 
afar off, as if she came from some finer and 
fairer world than ours ! Nay, we will not go out 
to meet her ; we will not go on board ; Captain 
Sindbad shall bring us the invoice of gold-dust, 
slaves, and rocs’ eggs to-night, and we will 
have some of the eggs for breakfast ; or if he 
never comes, are we not just as rich? But I 


6 & 


A DAY’S PLEASURE. 


think these friends of ours got a yet keener 
pleasure out of the spectacle of a large and 
stately ship, that with all sails spread moved 
silently and steadily out toward the open sea. 
It is yet grander and sweeter to sail toward 
the unknown than to come from it J and every 
vessel that leaves port has this destination, and 
will bear you thither if you will. 

“ It may be that the gulf shall wash us down ; 

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, 

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew,” 

absently murmured Lucy, looking on this 
beautiful apparition. 

“But I can’t help thinking of Ulysses’ 
cabin-boy, yonder,” said Cousin Frank, after 
a pause ; “ can you, Aunt Melissa ? ” 

“ I don’t understand what you ’re talking 
about, Franklin,” answered Aunt Melissa, 
somewhat severely. 

“ Why, I mean that there is a poor wretch 
of a boy on board there, who ’s run away, and 
whose heart must be aching just now at the 
thought of the home he has left. I hope Ulys- 
ses will be good to him, and not swear at liinv 
for a day or two, or knock him about with a 
belaying-pin. Just about this time his mother. 


THE AFTERNOON. 


63 


up in the country, is getting ready his supper, 
and wondering what ’s become of him, and tor- 
turing herself with hopes that break one by 
one; and to-night when she goes up to his 
empty room, having tried to persuade herself 
that the truant ’s come back and climbed in at 
the window — 55 

“ Why, Franklin, this is n’t true, is it P ” asks 
Aunt Melissa. 

“ Well, no, let ’s pray Heaven it is n’t, in this 
case. -It ’s been true often enough to be false 
for once.” 

“ What a great, ugly, black object a ship 
is ! ” said Cousin Lucy. 

Slowly the city rose up against the distance, 
sharpening all its outlines, and filling in all its 
familiar details, — like a fact which one dreams 
is a dream, and which, as the mists of sleep 
break away, shows itself for reality. 

The air grows closer and warmer, — it is 
the breath of the hot and toil-worn land. 

The boat makes her way up through the 
shipping, seeks her landing, and presently rubs 
herself affectionately against the wharf. The 
passengers quickly disperse themselves upon 
shore, dismissed each with an appropriate sar- 
casm by the tipsy man, who has had the means 


64 


A DAY’S PLEASURE. 


of keeping himself drunk throughout, and who 
now looks to the discharge of the boat’s 
cargo. 

As our friends leave the wharf-house behind 
them, and straggle uneasily, and very con- 
scious of sunburn, up the now silent length of 
Pearl Street to seek the nearest horse-cars, 
they are aware of a curious fidgeting of the 
nurse, who flies from one side of the pavement 
to the other and violently shifts the baby from 
one arm to the other. 

“ What ’s the matter ? ” asks Frank ; but 
before the nurse can answer, “ Tliim little div- 
ils,” he perceives that the whooping-coughers 
of the morning have taken the occasion to re- 
new a pleasant acquaintance, and are surround- 
ing the baby and nurse with an atmosphere of 
whooping-cough. 

“ I say, friends ! we can’t stand this, you 
know,” says the anxious father. “We must 
part some time, and this is a favorable mo- 
ment. Now I ’ll give you all this, if you don’t 
come another step ! ” and he empties out to 
them, from the hand-bags he carries, the frag- 
ments of lunch which the frugal mind of Aunt 
Melissa had caused her to store there. Upon 
these the whooping-coughers hurl themselves 



“ Frank and Lucy stalked ahead, with shawls dragging from 

their arms.” 


V 









♦ 



















THE AFTERNOON. 


67 


in a body, and are soon left round the corner. 
Yet they would have been no disgrace to our 
party, whose appearance was now most disrep- 
utable : Trank and Lucy stalked ahead, with 
shawls dragging from their arms, the former 
loaded down with hand-bags and the latter 
with india-rubbers; Aunt Melissa came next 
under a burden of bloated umbrellas ; the nurse 
last, with her hat awry, and the baby a carica- 
ture of its morning trimness, in her embrace. 
A day’s pleasure is so demoralizing, that no 
party can stand it, and come out neat and 
orderly. 

“ Cousin Trank,” asked Lucy, awfully, 
“what if we should meet the Mayflowers 
now ? ” — the Mayflowers being a very ancient 
and noble Boston family whose acquaintance 
was the great pride and terror of our friends’ 
lives. 

“ I should cut them dead,” said Trank, and 
scarcely spoke again till his party dragged 
slowly up the steps of their minute suburban 
villa. 

At the door his wife met them with a troubled 
and anxious face. 

“ Calamities ? ” asked Trank, desperately. 

“O, calamities upon calamities! We’ve 


68 


A DAY’S PLEASURE. 


got a lost child in the kitchen/’ answered Mrs. 
Sallie. 

“ 0 good heavens ! ” cried her husband. 
“Adieu, my dreams of repose, so desirable 
after the quantity of active enjoyment I’ve 
had! Well, where is the lost child?” 





III. 

THE EVENING. 



% 





/ 

V 





V 

J 






III. 

THE EVENING. 


HERE is the lost child? ” repeats 
Frank, desperately. "Where have 
you got him ? 55 
“ In the kitchen.” 

“ Why in the kitchen ? ” 

“ How ’s baby ? ” demands Mrs. Sallie, with 
the incoherent suddenness of her sex, and 
running half-way down the steps to meet the 
nurse. “ Um, urn, um-m-m-m,” sounds, which 
may stand for smothered kisses of rapture and 
thanksgiving that baby is nQt a lost child. 
“ Has he been good, Lucy ? Take him off and 
give him some cocoa, Mrs. O’Gonegal,” she 
adds in her business-like way, and with a little 
push to the combined nurse and baby, while 
Lucy answers, “ 0 beautiful ! 55 and from that 




72 


A DAY'S PLEASU11E. 


moment, being warned through all her being 
by something in the other’s tone, casts aside 
the matronly manner which she has worn dur- 
ing the day, and lapses into the comfortable 
irresponsibility of young-ladyhood. 

“ What kind of a time did you have ? ” 

“ Splendid ! ” answers Lucy. “ Delightful, 
I think,” she adds, as if she thought others 
might not think so. 

“ I suppose you found Gloucester a quaint 
old place.” 

“ 0,” says Drank, “ we did n’t go to Glouces- 
ter; we found that the City Lathers had 
chartered the boat for the day, so we thought 
we ’d go to Nahant.” 

“ Then you ’ve seen your favorite Gardens 
of Maolis ! What in the world are they 
like ? ” 

“ Well ; we did n’t see the Gardens of Mao- 
lis; the Naliant boat was so crowded that we 
could n’t think of going on her, and so we de- 
cided we ’d drive over to the Liverpool Wharf 
and go down to Nantasket Beach.” 

“ That was nice. I ’m so glad on Aunt 
Melissa’s account. It ’s much better to see the 
ocean from a long beach than from those Nahant 
rocks.” 


THE EVENING. 


73 

“ That ’s what / said. But, you know, when 
we got to the wharf the boat had just left.” 

“You don't mean it! Well, then, what 
under the canopy did you do ? ” 

“ Why, we sat down in the wharf-house, and 
waited from nine o’clock till half past two for 
the next boat.” 

“ Well, I ’m glad you did n’t back out, at 
any rate. You did ' show pluck, you poor 
things ! I hope you enjoyed the beach after 
you did get there.” 

“Why,” says Frank, looking down, “we 
never got there.” 

“Never got there!” gasps Mrs. Sallie. 
“ Did n’t you go down on the afternoon boat ? ” 

“ Yes.” 

“ Why did n’t you get to the beach, then ? ” 

“ We did n’t go ashore.” 

“ Well, that ’s like you, Frank.” 

“ It ’s a great deal more like Aunt Melissa,” 
answers Frank. “The air felt so raw and 
chilly by the time we reached the pier, that she 
declared the baby would perish if it was taken 
to the beach. Besides, nothing would persuade 
her that Nantasket Beach was at all different 
from Liverpool Wharf.” 

“ Never mind, never mind ! ” says Mrs. 


74 


A DAY’S PLEASURE. 


Sallie. “ I don’t wish to hear anything more. 
That ’s your idea of a day’s pleasure, is it P I 
call it a day’s disgrace, a day’s miserable giving- 
up. There, go in, go in ; I ’m ashamed of you 
all. Don’t let the neighbors see you, for pity’s 
sake. — We keep him in the kitchen,” she con- 
tinues, recurring to Frank’s long unanswered 
question concerning the lost child, “ because 
he prefers it as being the room nearest to the 
closet where the cookies are. He ’s taken ad- 
vantage of our sympathies to refuse everything 
but cookies.” 

“ I suppose that ’s one of the rights of 
lost childhood,” comments Frank, languidly ; 
“ there ’s no law that can compel him to touch 
even cracker.” 

“ Well, you ’d better go down and see what 
you can make of him. He ’s driven us all 
wild.” 

So Frank descends to the region now redo- 
lent of the preparing tea, and finds upon a 
chair, in the middle of the kitchen floor, a very 
forlorn little figure of a boy, mutely munching 
a sweet-cake, while now and then a tear steals 
down his cheeks and moistens the grimy traces 
of former tears. He and baby are, in the mean 
time, regarding each other with a steadfast 


THE EVENING. 75 

glare, the cook and the nurse supporting baby 
in this rite of hospitality. 

“Well, my little man/’ says his host, “ how 
did you get here ? ” 

The little man, perhaps because he is heart- 
ily sick of the question, is somewhat slow to 
answer that there was a fire ; and that he ran 
after the steamer ; and a girl found him and 
brought him up here. 

“ And that ’s all the blessed thing you can 
get out of him,” says cook ; and the lost boy 
looks as if he felt cook to be perfectly right. 

In spite of the well-meant endeavors of the 
household to wash him and brusli him, he is 
still a dreadfully travel-stained little boy, and 
he is powdered in every secret crease and 
wrinkle by that dust of old Charlesbridge, of 
which we always speak with an air of affected 
disgust, and a feeling of ill-concealed pride in 
an abomination so strikingly and peculiarly our 
own. He looks very much as if he had been 
following fire-engines about the streets of our 
learned and pulverous suburb ever since he 
could walk, and he certainly seems to feel 
himself in trouble to a certain degree ; but 
there is easily imaginable in his bearing a con- 
viction that after all the chief care is with 


76 


A DAY’S PLEASURE. 


others, and that, though unhappy, he is not 
responsible. The principal victim of his sor- 
rows is also penetrated by this opinion, and 
after gazing forlornly upon him for a while, 
asks mechanically, “ What 5 s your name ? ” 

“ Freddy,” is the laconic answer. 

“ Freddy — ? ” trying with an artful inflec- 
tion to lead him on to his surname. 

“ Freddy,” decidedly and conclusively. 

“ O, bless me ! What ’s the name of the 
street your papa lives on ? ” 

This problem is far too deep for Freddy, and 
he takes a bite of sweet-cake in sign that he 
does not think of solving it. Frank looks at 
him gloomily for a moment, and then deter- 
mines that he can grapple with the difficulty 
more successfully after he has had tea. “ Send 
up the supper, Bridget. I think, my dear,” he 
says, after they have sat down, “ we J d better all 
question our lost child when we ’ve finished.” 

So, when they have finished, they have him 
up in the sitting-room, and the inquisition 
begins. 

“ Now, Freddy,” his host says, with a cheer- 
ful air of lifelong friendship and confidence, 
“ you know that everybody has got two names. 
Of course your first name is Freddy, and it ’s 


THE EVENING. 


77 


a very pretty name. Well, I want you to 
think real hard, and then tell me what your 
other name is, so I can take you back to your 
mamma.” 

At this allusion the child looks round on the 
circle of eager and compassionate faces, and 
begins to shed tears and to wring all hearts. 

“ What ’s your name ? ” asks Frank, cheer- 
fully, — “your other name, you know ? ” 

“Freddy,” sobbed the forlorn creature. 

“ 0 good heaven ! this ’ll never do,” groaned 
the chief inquisitor. “New, Freddy, try not 
to cry. What is your papa’s name, — Mr. — ? ” 
with the leading inflection as before. 

“ Papa,” says Freddy. 

“ O, that ’ll never do ! Not Mr. Papa ? ” 

“ Yes,” persists Freddy. 

“ But, Freddy,” interposes Mrs. Sallie, as 
her husband falls back baffled, “ when ladies 
come to see your mamma, what do they call 
her? Mrs. — ” adopting Frank’s alluring in- 
flection. 

“Mrs. Mamma,” answers Freddy, confirmed 
in his error by this course ; and a secret dis- 
may possesses his questioners. They skirmish 
about him with every sort of query ; they try 
to entrap him into some kind of revelation by 


78 


A DAY’S PLEASURE. 


apparently irrelevant remarks ; they plan am- 
buscades and surprises ; but Freddy looks vigi- 
lantly round upon them, and guards his per- 
sonal history from every approach, and seems 
in every way so to have the best of it that it is 
almost exasperating. 

“ Kindness has proved futile,” observes 
Frank, “ and I think we ought as a last resort, 
before yielding ourselves to despair, to use in- 
timidation. Now, Fred,” he says, with sudden 
and terrible severity, “ what’s your father’s 
name ? ” 

The hapless little soul is really moved to an 
effort of memory by this, and blubbers out 
something that proves in the end to resemble 
the family name, though for the present it is 
merely a puzzle of unintelligible sounds.” 

“ Blackman ? ” cries Aunt Melissa, catching 
desperately at these sounds. 

On this, all the man and brother is roused in 
Freddy’s bosom, and he roars fiercely, “No! 
he ain’t a black man ! He ’s white ! ” 

“ I give it up,” says Frank, who has been 
looking for his hat. “ I ’m afraid we can’t 
make anything out of him ; and I ’ll have to go 
and report the case to the police. But, put him 
to bed, do, Sallie ; he ’s dropping with sleep.” 



“ They skirmish about him with every sort of query.” 



























* 






























THE EVENING. 


81 


So he went out,. of course supported morally 
by a sense of duty, but I am afraid also by a 
sense of adventure in some degree. It is not 
every day that, in so quiet a place as Charles- 
bridge, you can have a lost child cast upon 
your sympathies; and I believe that when an 
appeal is not really agonizing, we like so well 
to have our sympathies touched, we favorites 
of the prosperous commonplace, that most of 
us would enter eagerly into a pathetic case of 
this kind even after a day’s pleasure. Such 
was certainly the mood of my friend, and he 
unconsciously prepared himself for an equal 
interest on the pari? of the police ; but this was 
an error. The police heard his statement with 
all proper attention, and wrote it in full upon 
the station-slate, but they showed no feeling 
whatever, and behaved as if they valued a lost 
child no more than a child snug at home in his 
own crib. They said that no doubt his parents 
would be asking at the police-stations for him 
during the night, and, as if my friend would 
otherwise have thought of putting him into the 
street, they suggested that he should just keep 
the lost child till he was sent for. Modestly 
enough Trank proposed that they should make 
some inquiry for his parents, and was answered 


82 A DAY’S PLEASURE. 

by the question whether they could take a man 
off his beat for that purpose ; and remembering 
that beats in Charlesbridge were of such vast- 
ness that during his whole residence there he 
had never yet seen a policeman on his street, 
he was obliged to own to himself that his pro- 
posal was absurd. He felt the need of rein- 
stating himself by something more sensible, and 
so he said he thought he would go down to the 
Port and leave word at the station there ; and 
the police tacitly assenting to this he went. 

I who have sometimes hinted that the Square 
is not a centre of gayety, or a scene of the great- 
est activity by day, feel it right to say that it 
has some modest charms of its own on a sum- 
mer’s night, about the hour when Prank passed 
through it, when the post-office has just been 
shut, and when the different groups that haunt 
the place in front of the closing shops have 
dwindled to the loungers fit though few who 
will keep it well into the night, and may there 
be found, by the passenger on the last horse- 
car out from Boston, wrapt in a kind of social 
silence, and honorably attended by the police- 
man whose favored beat is in that neighbor- 
hood. They seem a feature of the bygone 
village life of Charlesbridge, and accord pleas- 


THE EVENING. 


83 


antly with the town-pump and the public horse- 
trough, and the noble elm that by night droops 
its boughs so pensively, and probably dreams 
of its happy younger days when there were no 
canker-worms in the world. Sometimes this 
choice company sits on the curbing that goes 
round the terrace at the elm-tree’s foot, and 
then I envy every soul in it, — so tranquil it 
seems, so cool, so careless, so morrowless. I 
cannot see the faces of that luxurious society, 
but there I imagine is the local albino, and a 
certain blind man, who resorts thither much by 
day, and makes a strange kind of jest of his 
own, with a flicker of humor upon his sightless 
face, and a faith that others less unkindly 
treated by nature will be able to see the point 
apparently not always discernible to himself. 
Late at night I have a fancy that the darkness 
puts him on an equality with other wits, and 
that he enjoys his own brilliancy as well as any 
one. 

At the Port station Prank was pleased and 
soothed by the tranquil air of the policeman, 
who sat in his shirt-sleeves outside the door, 
and seemed to announce, by his attitude of 
final disoccupation, that crimes and misde- 
meanors were no more. This officer at once 


84 


A DAY’S PLEASURE. 


showed a desirable interest in the case. He 
put on his blue coat that he might listen to the 
whole story in a proper figure, and then he 
took down the main points on the slate, and 
said that they would send word round to the 
other stations in the city, and the boy’s parents 
could hardly help hearing of him that night. 

Returned home, Trank gave his news, and 
then he and Mrs. Sallie went up to look at the 
lost child as he slept. The sumptuous diet to 
which he had confined himself from the first 
seemed to agree with him perfectly, for he 
slept unbrokenly, and apparently without a 
consciousness of his woes. On a chair lay his 
clothes, in a dusty little pathetic heap ; they 
were well-kept clothes, except for the wrong 
his wanderings had done them, and they showed 
a motherly care here and there, which it was 
not easy to look at with composure. The spec- 
tators of his sleep both thought of the curious 
chance that had thrown this little one into their 
charge, and considered that he was almost as 
completely a gift of the Unknown as if he had 
been following a steamer in another planet, 
and had thence dropped into their yard. His 
helplessness in accounting for himself was as 
affecting as that of the sublimest metaphysician ; 


THE EVENING. 


85 


and no learned man, no superior intellect, no 
subtle inquirer among us lost children of the 
divine, forgotten home, could have been less 
able to say how or whence he came to be just 
where he found himself. We wander away 
and away ; the dust of the roadside gathers 
upon us ; and when some strange shelter re- 
ceives us, we lie down to our sleep, inarticu- 
late, and haunted with dreams of memory, or 
the memory of dreams, knowing scarcely more 
of the past than of the future. 

“ What a strange world ! ” sighed Mrs. 
Sallie ; and then, as this was a mood far too 
speculative for her, she recalled herself to 
practical life suddenly. “ If we should have to 
adopt this child, Frank — ” 

“ Why, bless my soul, we ’re not obliged to 
adopt him ! Even a lost child can’t demand 
that.” 

“ We shall adopt him, if they don’t come 
for him. And now, T want to know ” (Mrs. 
Sallie spoke as if the adoption had been effected) 
“ whether we shall give him our name, or 
some other ? ” 

“ Well, I don’t know. It ’s the first child 
I ’ve ever adopted,” said Frank; “and upon 
my word, I can’t say whether you have to give 


86 


A DAT’S PLEASURE. 


him a new name or not. In fact, if I ’d 
thought of this affair of a name, I ’d never have 
adopted him. It ’s the greatest part of the 
burden, and if his father will only come for 
him, I ’ll give him up without a murmur.” 

In the interval that followed the proposal of 
this alarming difficulty, and while he sat and 
waited vaguely for whatever should be going 
to happen next, Prank was not able to repress 
a sense of personal resentment towards the 
little vagrant sleeping so carelessly there, 
though at the bottom of his heart there was 
all imaginable tenderness for him. In the 
fantastic character which, to his weariness, the 
day’s pleasure took on, it seemed an extraordi- 
nary unkindness of fate that this lost child 
should have been kept in reserve for him after 
all the rest ; and he had so small consciousness 
of bestowing shelter and charity, and so pro- 
found a feeling of having himself been turned 
out of house and .home by some surprising and 
potent agency, that if the lost child had been a 
regiment of Penians billeted upon him, it could 
not have oppressed him more. While he re- 
mained perplexed in this perverse sentiment 
of invasion and dispossession, “ Hark ! ” said 
Mrs. Sallie, “ what ’s that ? ” 


THE EVENING. 


87 


It was a noise of dragging and shuffling on 
the walk in front of the house, and a low, 
hoarse whispering. 

“ I don’t know,” said Frank, “ hut from the 
kind of pleasure I ’ve got out of it so far, I 
should say that this holiday was capable of an 
earthquake before midnight.” 

“ Listen ! ” 

They listened, as they must, and heard the 
outer darkness rehearse a raucous dialogue 
between an unseen Bill and Jim, who were the 
more terrible to the imagination from being so 
realistically named, and who seemed to have in 
charge some nameless third person, a mute 
actor in the invisible scene. There was doubt, 
which he uttered, in the mind of Jim, whether 
they could get this silent comrade along much 
farther without carrying him ; and there was a 
growling assent from Bill that he was pretty 
far gone, that was a fact, and that maybe Jim 
had better go for the wagon ; then there were 
quick, retreating steps ; and then there was a 
profound silence, in which the audience of this 
strange drama sat thrilled and speechless. The 
effect was not less dreadful when there rose 
a dull sound, as of a helpless body rubbing 
against the fence, and at last lowered heavily 
to the ground. 


88 


A DAY’S PLEASURE. 


“ Oli ! 55 cried Mrs. Sallie. “ Do go out and 
help. He ’s dying ! ” 

But even as she spoke the noise of wheels 
was heard. A wagon stopped before the door ; 
there came a tugging and lifting, with a sound 
as of crunching gravel, and then a “ There ! ” 
of great relief. 

“ Trank ! 55 said Mrs. Sallie very solemnly, 
“ if you don’t go out and help those men, 1 ’ll 
never forgive you.” 

Beally, the drama had grown very impress- 
ive ; it was a mystery, to say the least ; and so 
it must remain forever, for when Frank, in- 
fected at last by Mrs. Sallie’s faith in tragedy, 
opened the door and offered his tardy services, 
the wagon was driven rapidly away without 
reply. They never learned what it had all 
been ; and I think that if one actually honors 
mysteries, it is best not to look into them. 
How much finer, after all, if you have such a 
thing as this happen before your door at mid- 
night, not to throw any light upon it ! Then 
your probable tipsy man cannot be proved 
other than a tragical presence, which you can 
match with any inscrutable creation of fiction ; 
and if you should ever come to write a romance, 
as one is very liable to do in this age, there is 


THE EVENING. 


89 


your unknown, a figure of strange and fearful 
interest, made to your hand, and capable of 
being used, in or out of the body, with a very 
gloomy effect. 

While our friends yet trembled with this 
sensation, quick steps ascended to their door, 
and then followed a sharp, anxious tug at the 
bell. 

“ Ah ! ” cried Trank, prophetically, “ here ’s 
the father of our adopted son 55 ; and he opened 
the door. 

The gentleman who appeared there could 
scarcely frame the question to which Trank 
replied so cheerfully : “ O yes ; he ’s here, and 
snug in bed, and fast asleep. Come up stairs 
and look at him. Better let him be till morn- 
ing, and then come after him,” he added, as 
they looked down a moment on the little 
sleeper. 

“ 0 no, I could n’t,” said the father, con ex- 
pressions ; and then he told how he had heard 
of the child’s whereabouts at the Port station, 
and had hurried to get him, and how his moth- 
er did not know he was found yet, and was 
almost wild about him. They had no idea how 
he had got lost, and his own blind story was 
the only tale of his adventure that ever became 
known. 


90 


A DAY’S PLEASURE. 


By this time his father had got the child 
partly awake, and the two men were dressing 
him in men’s clumsy fashion ; and finally they 
gave it up, and rolled him in a shawl. The 
father lifted the slight burden, and two small 
arms fell about his neck. The weary child 
slept again. 

“ Iiow has he behaved ? ” asked the father. 

“Like a little hero,” said Frank, “ but he ’s 
been a cormorant for cookies. I think it right 
to tell you, in case he should n’t be very brill- 
iant to-morrow, that he would n’t eat a bit of 
anything else.” 

The father said he was the life of their house ; 
and Frank said he knew how that was, — that 
he had a life of the house of his own ; and then 
the father thanked him very simply and touch- 
ingly, and with the decent New England self- 
restraint, which is doubtless so much better 
than any sort of effusion. “ Say good night 
to the gentleman, Freddy,” he said at the door ; 
and Freddy with closed eyes murmured a good- 
night from far within the land of dreams, and 
then was borne away to the house out of which 
the life had wandered with his little feet. 

“I don’t know, Sallie,” said Frank, when 
/ie had given all the eagerly demanded particu- 


THE EVENING. 


91 

lars about the child’s father, — “ I don’t know 
whether I should want many such holidays as 
this, in the course of the summer. On the 
whole, I think I ’d better overwork myself 
and not take any relaxation, if I mean to live 
long. And yet I ’m not sure that the day ’s 
been altogether a failure, though all our pur- 
poses of enjoyment have miscarried. I did n’t 
plan to find a lost child here, when I got home, 
and I ’m afraid I have n’t had always the most 
Christian feeling towards him ; but he ’s really 
the saving grace of the affair ; and if this were 
a little comedy 1 had been playing, I should 
turn him to account with the jaded audience, 
and advancing to the foot-liglits, should say, 
with my hand on my waistcoat, and a neat 
bow, that although every hope of the day had 
been disappointed, and nothing I had meant to 
do had been done, yet the man who had ended 
at midnight by restoring a lost child to the 
arms of its father, must own that, in spite 
of adverse fortune, he had enjoyed A Day’s 
Pleasure.” 





BUYING A HORSE. 






* 



BUYING A HORSE. 


F one has money enough, there 
seems no reason why one should 
not go and buy such a horse as he 
wants. This is the commonly accepted 
theory, on which the whole commerce in 
horses is founded, and on which my friend 
proceeded. 

He was about removing from Charles- 
bridge, where he had lived many happy 
years without a horse, farther into the 
country, where there were charming drives 
and inconvenient distances, and where a 
horse would be very desirable, if not quite 
necessary. But as a horse seemed at first 
an extravagant if not sinful desire, he be- 




96 


BUYING A HORSE. 


gan by talking vaguely round, and rather 
hinting than declaring that he thought 
somewhat of buying. The professor to 
whom he first intimated his purpose flung 
himself from his horse’s back to the grassy 
border of the sidewalk where my friend 
stood, and said he would give him a few 
points. “ In the first place don’t buy a 
horse that shows much daylight under him, 
unless you buy a horse-doctor with him ; 
get a short-legged horse; and he ought to 
be short and thick in the barrel,” — or 
words to that effect. “ Don’t get a horse 
witli a narrow forehead : there are horse- 
fools as well as the other kind, and you 
want a horse with room for brains. And 
look out that he ’s all right forward” 
u What’s that?” asked my friend, hear- 
ing this phrase for the first time. 

“ That he is n’t tender in his fore-feet, — 
that the hoof is n’t contracted,” said the 
professor, pointing out the well-planted 
foot of his own animal. 


BUYING A HORSE. 


97 


“ What ought I to pay* for a horse?” 
pursued my friend, struggling to fix the 
points given by the professor in a mind 
hitherto unused to points of the kind. 

“ Well, horses are cheap, now ; and you 
ouodit to get a fair family horse — You 
want a family horse ? ” 

“Yes” 

“ Something you can ride and drive 
both ? Something your children can 
drive ? ” 

“ l r es, yes.” 

“ Well, you ought to get such a horse 
as that for a hundred and twenty-five dol- 
lars.” 

This was the figure my friend had 
thought of ; he drew a breath of relief. 
“ Where did you buy your horse ? ” 

“ Oh, I always get my horses ” — the 
plural abashed my friend — “at the Chev- 
aliers’. If you throw yourself on their 
mercy, they ’ll treat you well. I ’ll send 
you a note to them.” 


98 


BUYING A HORSE. 


“ Do ! ” cried my friend, as the profes- 
sor sprang upon his horse, and galloped 
away. 

My friend walked home encouraged ; 
his purpose of buying a horse had not 
seemed so monstrous, at least to this 
hardened offender. He now began to an- 
nounce it more boldly ; he said right and 
left that he wished to buy a horse, but 
that he would not go above a hundred. 
This was not true, but he wished to act 
prudently, and to pay a hundred and 
twenty-five only in extremity. He car- 
ried the, professor’s note to the Chevaliers’, 
who duly honored it, understood at once 
what my friend wanted, and said they 
would look out for him. They were sorry 
he had not happened in a little sooner, — 
they had just sold the very horse he 
wanted. I may as well say here that they 
were not able to find him a horse, but 
that they used him with the strictest 
honor, and that short of supplying his 
want they were perfect. 


His premises at certain hours of the morning presented the 

effect of a Horse- Fair. 

























































































*- 




























































BUYING A HORSE. 


101 


Iii the mean time the irregular dealers 
began to descend upon him, as well as 
amateurs to whom he had mentioned his 
wish for a horse, and his premises at cer- 
tain hours of the morning presented the 
effect of a horse-fair, or say rather a mu- 
seum of equine bricabrac. At first he 
blushed at the spectacle, but he soon be- 
came hardened to it, and liked the excite- 
ment of driving one horse after another 
round the block, and deciding upon him. 
To a horse, they had none of the qualities 
commended by the professor, but they had 
many others which the dealers praised. 
These persons were not discouraged when 
he refused to buy, but cheerfully returned 
the next day with others differently ruin- 
ous. They were men of a spirit more 
obliging than my friend has found in other 
walks. One of them, who paid him a pref- 
atory visit in his library, in five minutes 
augmented from six to seven hundred and 
fifty pounds the weight of a pony-horse, 


102 


BUYING A HORSE. 


which he wished to sell. (“ What you 
want/’ said the Chevaliers, “ is a pony- 
horse,’ ’ and my friend, gratefully catching 
at the phrase, had gone about saying he 
wanted a pony-horse. After that, hulking 
brutes of from eleven to thirteen hundred 
pounds were every day brought to him as 
pony-horses.) The same dealer came an- 
other day with a mustang, in whom was 
no fault, and who had every appearance of 
speed, but who was only marking time as it 
is called in military drill, I believe, when 
he seemed to be getting swiftly over the 
ground ; he showed a sociable preference 
for the curbstone in turning corners, and 
was condemned, to be replaced the next 
evening by a pony-horse that a child might 
ride or drive, and that especially would 
not shy. Upon experiment, he shied half 
across the road, and the fact was reported 
to the dealer. He smiled compassionately. 
“ What did he shy at ? ” 

“ A wheelbarrow.’ ’ 


BUYING A HORSE. 


103 


“ Well ! I never see the hoss yet that 
would n't shy at a wheelbarrow.’’ 

My friend owned that a wheelbarrow 
was of an alarming presence, but he had 
his reserves respecting the self-control and 
intelligence of this pony-horse. The dealer 
amiably withdrew him, and said that he 
would bring next day a horse — if he 
could get the owner to part with a family 
pet — that would suit ; but upon investiga- 
tion it appeared that this treasure was what 
is called a calico-horse, and my friend, who 
was without the ambition to figure in the 
popular eye as a stray circus- rider, de- 
clined to see him. 

These adventurous spirits were not 
squeamish. They thrust their hands into 
the lathery mouths of their brutes to show 
the state of their teeth, and wiped their 
fingers on their trousers or grass after- 
wards, without a tremor, though my friend 
could never forbear a shudder at the sight. 
If sometimes they came with a desirable 


104 


BUYING A HORSE. 


animal, the price was far beyond his mod- 
est figure ; but generally they seemed to 
think that he did not want a desirable ani- 
mal. In most cases, the pony-horse pro- 
nounced sentence upon himself by some 
gross and ridiculous blemish ; but some- 
times my friend failed to hit upon any ten- 
able excuse for refusing him. In such an 
event, he would say, with an air of easy 
and candid comradery, “ Well, now, what ’s 
the matter with him?” And then the 
dealer, passing his hand down one of the 
pony-horse’s fore-legs, would respond, with 
an upward glance of searching inquiry at 
my friend, “ Well, he’s a leetle mite ten- 
der for’a’d.” 

I am afraid my friend grew to have a 
cruel pleasure in forcing them to this ex- 
posure of the truth ; but he excused him- 
self upon the ground that they never ex- 
pected him to be alarmed at this tenderness 
forward, and that their truth was not a 
tribute to virtue, but was contempt of his 


BUYING A HORSE. 


105 


ignorance. Nevertheless, it was truth ; 
and he felt that it must be his part there- 
after to confute the common belief that 
there is no truth in horse-trades. 

These people were not usually the own- 
ers of the horses they brought, but the 
emissaries or agents of the owners. Often 
they came merely to show a horse, and 
were not at all sure that his owner would 
part with him on any terms, as he was a 
favorite with the ladies of the family. An 
impenetrable mystery hung about the own- 
er, through which he sometimes dimly 
loomed as a gentleman in failing health, 
who had to give up his daily drives, and 
had no use for the horse. There were 
cases in which the dealer came secretly, 
from pure zeal, to show a horse whose 
owner supposed him still in the stable, and 
who must be taken back before his ab- 
sence was noticed. If my friend insisted 
upon knowing the owner and conferring 
with him, in any of these instances, it was 


106 


BUYING A HORSE. 


darkly admitted that he was a gentleman 
in the livery business over in Somerville 
or down in the Lower Port. Truth, it 
seemed, might be absent or present in a 
horse-trade, but mystery was essential. 

The dealers had a jargon of their own, 
in which my friend became an expert. 
They did not say that a horse weighed a 
thousand pounds, but ten hundred ; he 
was not worth a hundred and twenty-five 
dollars, but one and a quarter ; he was not 
going on seven years old, but was coming 
seven. There are curious facts, by the 
way, in regard to the age of horses which 
are not generally known. A horse is 
never of an even age : that is, he is not 
six, or eight, or ten, but five, or seven, or 
nine years old ; he is sometimes, but not 
often, eleven ; he is never thirteen ; his 
favorite time of life is seven, and he rarely 
gets beyond it, if on sale. My friend found 
the number of horses brought into the 
world in 1871 quite beyond computation. 


BUYING A HORSE. 


107 


He also found that most hard-working 
horses were sick or ailing, as most hard- 
working men and women are ; that per- 
fectly sound horses are as rare as perfectly 
sound human beings, and are apt, like the 
latter, to be vicious. 

He began to have a quick eye for the 
characteristics of horses, and could walk 
round a proffered animal and scan his 
points with the best. “ What,” he would 
ask, of a given beast, “ makes him let his 
lower lip hang down in that imbecile man- 
ner ? ” 

“ Oh, he ’s got a parrot-mouth. Some 
folks like ’em.” Here the dealer would 
pull open the creature’s flabby lips, and 
discover a beak like that of a polyp ; and 
the cleansing process on the grass or trou- 
sers would take place. 

Of another. “ What makes him trot in 
that spread-out, squatty way, behind ? ” he 
demanded, after the usual tour of the 
block. 


108 


BUYING A HORSE. 


“ He travels wide. Horse men prefer 
that.” 

They pref erred any ugliness or awk- 
wardness in a horse to the opposite grace 
or charm, and all that my friend could 
urge, in meek withdrawal from negotia- 
tion, was that he was not of an educated 
taste. In the course of long talks, which 
frequently took the form of warnings, he 
became wise in the tricks practiced by all 
dealers except his interlocutor. One of 
these, a device for restoring youth to an 
animal nearing the dangerous limit of 
eleven, struck him as peculiarly ingenious. 
You pierce the forehead, and blow into it 
with a quill ; this gives an agreeable full- 
ness, and erects the drooping ears in a 
spirited and mettlesome manner, so that a 
horse coming eleven will look for a time 
as if he were coming five. 

After a thorough course of the volunteer 
dealers, and after haunting the Chevaliers' 
stables for several weeks, my friend found 


BUYING A HORSE. 


109 


that not money alone was needed to buy a 
horse. The affair began to wear a sinister 
aspect. He had an uneasy fear that in sev- 
eral cases he had refused the very horse he 
wanted with the aplomb he had acquired in 
dismissing undesirable beasts. The fact 
was he knew less about horses than when 
he began to buy, while he had indefinitely 
enlarged his idle knowledge of men, of 
their fatuity and hollowness. He learned 
that men whom he had always envied their 
brilliant omniscience in regard to horses, 
as they drove him out behind their dash- 
ing trotters, were quite ignorant and help- 
less in the art of buying ; they always got 
somebody else to buy their horses for 
them. “ Find a man you can trust,” they 
said, “ and then put yourself in his hands. 
And never trust anybody about the health 
of a horse. Take him to a veterinary ^sur- 
geon, and have him go all over him.” 

My friend grew sardonic ; then he grew 
melancholy and haggard. There was some- 


110 


BUYING A HORSE 


thing very strange in the fact that a person 
unattainted of crime, and not morally dis- 
abled in any known way, could not take 
his money and buy such a horse as lie 
wanted with it. His acquaintance began 
to recommend men to him. <k If you want 
a horse, Captain Jenks is your man.” 
“ Why don’t you go to Major Snaffle ? 
He ’d take pleasure in it.” But mv friend, 
naturally reluctant to trouble others, and 
sickened by long failure, as well as mad- 
dened by the absurdity that if you wanted 
a horse you must first get a man, neglected 
this really good advice. He lost his inter- 
est in the business, and dismissed with 
lack-lustre indifference the horses which 
continued to be brought to his gate. He 
felt that his position before the community 
was becoming notorious and ridiculous. 
He slept badly ; his long endeavor for a 
horse ended in nightmares. 

One day he said to a gentleman whose 
turn-out he had long admired, “ I wonder 
if you could n’t find me a horse ! ” 


BUYING A HORSE. 


Ill 


“ Want a horse ? ” 

“ Want a horse ! I thought my need 
was known beyond the sun. I thought my 
want of a horse was branded on my fore- 
head.” 

This gentleman laughed, and then he 
said, “I’ve just seen a mare that would 
suit you. I thought of buying her, but I 
want a match, and this mare is too small. 
She ’ll be round here in fifteen minutes, 
and I ’ll take you out with her. Can you 
wait?” 

“Wait!” My friend laughed in his 
turn. 

The mare dashed up before the fifteen 
minutes had passed. She was beautiful, 
black as a coal ; and kind as a kitten, said 
her driver. My friend thought her head 
was rather big. “ Why, yes, she ’s a pony- 
horse ; that ’s what I like about her.” 

She trotted off wonderfully, and my 
friend felt that the thing was now done. 

The gentleman, who was driving, laid 


112 


BUYING A HORSE. 


his head on one side, and listened. “ Clicks, 
don’t she ? ” 

“ She does click,” said my friend oblig- 
ingly. 

“Hear it?” asked the gentleman. 

“ Well, if you ask me,” said my friend, 
u I don't hear it. What is clicking? ” 

“ Oh, striking the heel of her fore-foot- 
with the toe of her hind-foot. Sometimes 
it comes from bad shoeing. Some people 
like it. I don’t myself.” After a while 
he added, “ If you can get this mare for a 
hundred and twenty-five, you ’d better buy 
her.” 

“Well, I will,” said my friend. He 
would have bought her, in fact, if she had 
clicked like a noiseless sewing-machine. 
But the owner, remote as Medford, and in- 
visibly dealing, as usual, through a third 
person, would not sell her for one and a 
quarter ; he wanted one and a half. Be- 
sides, another Party was trying to get her ; 
and now ensued a negotiation which for 


BUYING A HORSE. 


113 


intricacy and mystery surpassed all the 
others. It was conducted in my friend’s 
interest by one who had the difficult task 
of keeping the owner’s imagination in 
check and his demands within bounds, for 
it soon appeared that he wanted even more 
than one and a half for her. Unseen and 
inaccessible, he grew every day more un- 
manageable. He entered into relations 
with the other Party, and it all ended in 
his sending her out one day after my friend 
had gone into the country, and requiring 
him to say at once that he would give one 
and a half. He was not at home, and he 
never saw the little mare again. This con- 
firmed him in the belief that she was the 
very horse he ought to have had. 

People had now begun to say to him, 
“ Why don’t you advertise ? Advertise for 
a gentleman’s pony-horse and phaeton and 
harness complete. You ’ll have a perfect 
procession of them before night.” This 
proved true. His advertisement, mystically 


114 


BUYING A HORSE. 


worded after the fashion of those things, 
found abundant response. But the estab- 
lishments which he would have taken he 
could not get at the figure he had set, and 
those which his money would buy he would 
not have. They came at all hours of the 
day ; and he never returned home after an 
an absence without meeting the reproach 
that now the very horse he wanted had 
just been driven away, and would not be 
brought back, as his owner lived in Biller- 
ica, and only happened to be down. A 
few equipages really appeared desirable, 
but in regard to these his jaded faculties 
refused to work : he could decide toothing ; 
his volition was extinct ; he let them come 
and go. 

It was at this period that people who had 
at first been surprised that he wished to buy 
a horse came to believe that he had bought 
one, and were astonished to learn that he 
had not. He felt the pressure of public 
opinion. 


BUYING A HORSE. 


115 


He began to haunt the different sale-sta- 
bles in town, and to look at horses with a 
view to buying at private sale. Every fa- 
cility for testing them was offered him, but 
he could not make up his mind. In feeble 
wantonness he gave appointments which 
he knew he should not keep, and, passing 
his days in an agony of multitudinous inde- 
cision, he added to the lies in the world the 
hideous sum of his broken engagements. 
From time to time he forlornly appeared 
at the Chevaliers’, and refreshed his cor- 
rupted nature by contact with their sterling 
integrity. Once he ventured into their 
establishment just before an auction began, 
and remained dazzled by the splendor of a 
spectacle which I fancy can be paralleled 
only by some dream of a mediaeval tourna- 
ment. The horses, brilliantly harnessed, 
accurately shod, and standing tall on bur- 
nished hooves, their necks curved by the 
check rein and their black and blonde 
manes flowing over the proud arch, lustrous 


116 


BUYING A HORSE. 


and wrinkled like satin, were ranged in a 
glittering hemicycle. They affected my 
friend like the youth and beauty of his ear- 
liest evening parties ; he experienced a 
sense of bashfulness, of sickening personal 
demerit. He could not have had the au- 
dacity to bid on one of those superb creat- 
ures, if all the Chevaliers together had 
whispered him that here at last was the 
very horse. 

I pass over an unprofitable interval in 
which he abandoned himself to despair, and 
really gave up the hope of being able ever 
to buy a horse. During this interval he 
removed from Charlesb ridge to the coun- 
try, and found himself, to his self-scorn and 
self-pity, actually reduced to hiring a livery 
horse by the day. But relief was at hand. 
The carpenter who had remained to finish 
up the new house after my friend had gone 
into it bethought himself of a firm in his 
place who brought on horses from the 
West, and had the practice of selling a 


BUYING A HORSE. 117 

horse on trial, and constantly replacing it 
with other horses till the purchaser was 
suited. This seemed an ideal arrangement, 
and the carpenter said that he thought they 
had the very horse my friend wanted. 

The next day he drove him up T and upon 
the plan of successive exchanges till the 
perfect horse was reached, my friend 
bought him for one and a quarter, the fig- 
ure which he had kept in mind from the 
first. He bought a phaeton and harness 
from the same people, and when the whole 
equipage stood at his door, he felt the long- 
delayed thrill of pride and satisfaction. 
The horse was of the Morgan breed, a 
bright bay, small and round and neat, with 
a little head tossed high, and a gentle yet 
alert movement. He was in the prime of 
youth, of the age of which every horse de- 
sires to be, and was just coming seven. 
My friend had already taken him to a 
horse-doctor, who for one dollar had gone 
all over him, and pronounced him sound as 


118 BUYING A HORSE. 

a fish, and complimented his new owner 
upon his acquisition. It all seemed too 
good to be true. As Billy turned his soft 
eye on the admiring family group, and suf - 
fered one of the children to smooth his 
nose while another held a lump of sugar to 
his dainty lips, his amiable behavior restored 
my friend to his peace of mind and his long- 
lost faith in a world of reason. 

The ridiculous planet, wavering bat-like 
through space, on which it had been im- 
possible for an innocent man to buy a suit- 
able horse was a dream of the past, and he 
had the solid, sensible old earth under his 
feet once more. He mounted into the phae- 
ton and drove off with his wife; he re- 
turned and gave each of the children a drive 
in succession. He told them that any of 
them could drive Billy as much as they 
liked, and he quieted a clamor for exclu- 
sive ownership on the part of each oy de^ 
daring that Billy belonged to the whole 
family. To this day he cannot look back 


BUYING A HORSE. 


119 


to those moments without tenderness. If 
Billy had any apparent fault, it was an 
amiable indolence. But this made him all 
the safer for the children, and it did not 
really amount to laziness. While on sale 
he had been driven in a provision cart, and 
had therefore the habit of standing un- 
hitched. One had merely to fling the reins 
into the bottom of the phaeton and leave 
Billy to his own custody. Ilis other habit 
of drawing up at kitchen gates was not con- 
firmed, and the fact that he stumbled on his 
way to the doctor who pronounced him 
blameless was reasonably attributed to a 
loose stone at the foot of the hill ; the mis- 
step resulted in a barked shin, but a little 
wheel -grease, in a horse of Billy’s com- 
plexion, easily removed the evidence of 
this. 

It was natural that after Billy was 
bought and paid for, several extremely 
desirable horses should be offered to my 
friend by their owners, who came in person, 


120 


BUYING A HORSE. 


stripped of all the adventitious mystery of 
agents and middle-men. They were gen- 
tlemen, and they spoke the English habit- 
ual with persons not corrupted by horses. 
My friend saw them come and go with 
grief; for he did not like to be shaken in 
his belief that Billy was the only horse in 
the world for him, and he would have liked 
to purchase their animals, if only to show 
his appreciation of honor and frankness and 
sane language. Yet he was consoled by 
the possession of Billy, whom he found in- 
creasingly excellent and trustworthy. Any 
of the family drove him about ; he stood 
unhitched ; he was not afraid of cars ; he 
was as kind as a kitten ; he had not, as the 
neighboring coachman said, a voice, though 
he seemed a little loively in coming out of 
the stable sometimes. He went well un- 
der the saddle ; he was a beauty, and if he 
had a voice, it was too great satisfaction m 
his personal appearance. 

One evening after tea, the young gentle- 


BUYING A HORSE. 


121 


man, who was about to drive Billy out, 
stung by the reflection that he had not 
taken blackberries and cream twice, ran 
into the house to repair the omission, and 
left Billy, as usual, unhitched at the door. 
During his absence, Billy caught sight of 
his stable, and involuntarily moved towards 
it. Finding himself unchecked, he gently 
increased his pace ; and when my friend ? 
looking up from the melon-patch - which 
he was admiring, called out, Ho, Billy ! 
Whoa, Billy ! ” and headed him off from 
the gap, Billy profited by the circumstance 
to turn into the pear orchard. The elastic 
turf under his unguided hoof seemed to 
exhilarate him ; his pace became a trot, a 
canter, a gallop, a tornado ; the reins flut- 
tered like ribbons in the air ; the phaeton 
flew ruining after. In a terrible cyclone 
the equipage swept round the neighbor’s 
house, vanished, reappeared, swooped down 
his lawn, and vanished again. It was in- 
credible. 


122 


BUYING A HORSE. 


My friend stood transfixed among his 
melons. He knew that his neighbor’s 
children played under the porte-cochere 
on the other side of the house which Billy 
had just surrounded in his flight, and prob- 
ably .... My friend’s first impulse was 
not to go and see, but to walk into his 
own house, and ignore the whole affair. 
But you cannot really ignore an affair of 
that kind. You must face it, and com- 
monly it stares you out of countenance. 
Commonly, too, it knows how to choose 
its time so as to disgrace as well as crush 
its victim. His neighbor had people to 
tea, and long before my friend reached 
the house the host and his guests were all 
out on the lawn, having taken the precau- 
tion to bring their napkins with them. 

“ The children ! ” gasped my friend. 

“Oh, they were all in bed,” said the 
neighbor, and he began to laugh. That 
was right ; my friend would have mocked 
at the calamity if it had been his neigh- 


BUYING A HORSE. 


123 


bor’s. “ Let us go and look up your pha- 
eton.” He put his hand on the naked 
flank of a fine young elm, from which the 
bark had just been stripped. “ Billy seems 
to have passed this way.” 

At the foot of a stone- wall four feet 
high lay the phaeton, with three wheels 
in the air, and the fourth crushed flat 
against the axle ; the willow back was 
broken, the shafts were pulled out, and 
Billy was gone. 

“ Good thing there was nobody in it,” 
said the neighbor. 

“ Good thing it did n’t run down some 
Irish family, and get you in for damages,” 
said a guest. 

It appeared, then, that there were two 
good things about this disaster. My friend 
had not thought there were so many, but 
while he rejoiced in this fact, he rebelled 
at the notion that a sorrow like that ren- 
dered the sufferer in any event liable for 
damages, and he resolved that he never 


124 


BUYING A HORSE. 


would have paid them. But probably he 
would. 

Some half-grown boys got the phaeton 
right-side up, and restored its shafts and 
cushions, and it limped away with them 
towards the carriage-house. Presently an- 
other half-grown boy came riding Billy up 
the hill. Billy showed an inflated nostril 
and an excited eye, but physically he was 
unharmed, save for a slight scratch on 
what was described as the off hind-leg ; 
the reader may choose which leg this was. 

“ The worst of it is,” said the guest, 
“ that you never can trust ’em after they ’ve 
run off once.” 

“ Have some tea ? ” said the host to my 
friend. 

“ No, thank you,” said my friend, in 
whose heart the worst of it rankled ; and 
he walked home embittered by his guilty 
consciousness that Billy ought never to 
have been left untied. But it was not 
this self-reproach ; it was not the muti- 


BUYING A HORSE. 


125 


lated phaeton ; it was not the loss of 
Billy, who must now be sold ; it was the 
wreck of settled hopes, the renewed sus- 
pense of faith, the repetition of the trag- 
ical farce of buying another horse, that 
most grieved my friend. 

Billy’s former owners made a feint of 
supplying other horses in his place, but 
the only horse supplied was an aged vet- 
eran with the scratches, who must have 
come seven early in our era, and who, 
from his habit of getting about on tip- 
toe, must have been tender for’a’d beyond 
anything of my friend’s previous experi- 
ence. Probably if he could have waited 
they might have replaced Billy in time, 
but their next installment from the West 
produced nothing suited to his wants but 
a horse with the presence and carriage of 
a pig, and he preferred to let them sell 
Billy for what he would bring, and to 
trust his fate elsewhere. Billy had fallen 
nearly one half in value, and he brought 


126 


BUYING A HORSE. 


very little — to his owner; though the 
new purchaser was afterwards reported to 
value him at much more than what my 
friend had paid for him. These things 
are really mysteries ; you cannot fathom 
them; it is idle to try. My friend re* 
mained grieving over his own folly and 
carelessness, with a fond hankering for 
the poor little horse he had lost, and the 
belief that he should never find such an- 
other. Yet he was not without a philan- 
thropist’s consolation. He had added to 
the stock of harmless pleasures in a de- 
gree of which he could not have dreamed. 
All his acquaintance knew that he had 
bought a horse, and they all seemed now 
to conspire in asking him how he got on 
with it. He was forced to confess the 
truth. On hearing it, his friends burst 
into shouts of laughter, and smote their 
persons, and stayed themselves against 
lamp-posts and house-walls. They begged 
his pardon, and then they began again, 


BUYING A HORSE. 


127 


and shouted and roared anew. Since the 

gale which blew down the poet ’s 

chimneys and put him to the expense of 
rebuilding them, no joke so generally satis- 
factory had been offered to the community. 
My friend had, in his time, achieved the 
reputation of a wit by going about and 
and saying , u Did yon know ’s chim- 

neys had blown down ? ” and he had now 
himself the pleasure of causing the like 
quality of wit in others. 

Having abandoned the hope of getting 
anything out of the people who had sold 
him Billy, he was for a time the prey of 
an inert despair, in which he had not even 
spirit to repine at the disorder of a uni- 
verse in which he could not find a horse. 
Ko horses were now offered to him, for it 
had become known throughout the trade 
that he had bought a horse. He had 
therefore to set about counteracting this 
impression with what feeble powers were 
left him. Of the facts of that period he 


128 


BUYING A HORSE. 


remembers with confusion and remorse the 
trouble to which he put the owner of the 
pony-horse Pansy, whom he visited re- 
peatedly in a neighboring town, at a loss 
of time and money to himself, and with no 
result but to embarrass Pansy’s owner in 
his relations with people who had hired 
him and did not wish him sold. Some- 
thing of the old baffling mystery hung over 
Pansy’s whereabouts ; he was with diffi- 
culty produced, and when en evidence he 
was not the Pansy my friend had expected, 
lie paltered with his regrets ; he covered 
his disappointment with what pretenses ha 
could ; and he waited till he could tele- 
graph back his adverse decision. His con- 
clusion was that, next to proposing mar- 
riage, there was no transaction of life that 
involved so many delicate and complex re- 
lations as buying a horse, and that the 
rupture of a horse-trade was little less em- 
barrassing and distressing to all concerned 
than a broken engagement. There was a 


BUYING A HORSE. 


129 


terrible intimacy in the affair ; it was 
alarmingly personal. He went about sor- 
rowing for the pain and disappointment he 
had inflicted on many amiable people of 
all degrees who had tried to supply him 
with a horse. 

“ Look here,” said his neighbor, finding 
him in this low state, “ why don’t you get 
a horse of the gentleman who furnishes 
mine?” This had been suggested before, 
and my friend explained that he had dis- 
liked to make trouble. His scruples were 
lightly set aside, and he suffered himself to 
be entreated. The fact was he was so dis- 
couraged with his attempt to buy a horse 
that if any one had now given him such a 
horse as he wanted he would have taken it. 

One sunny, breezy morning his neigh- 
bor drove my friend over to the beautiful 
farm of the good genius on whose kindly 
offices he had now fixed his languid hopes. 

I need not say what the landscape was in 
mid- August, or how, as they drew near the 


130 


BUYING A HORSE. 


farm, the air was enriched with the breath 
of vast orchards of early apples, — apples 
that no forced fingers rude shatter from 
their stems, but that ripen and mellow un- 
touched, till they drop into the straw with 
which the orchard aisles are bedded ; it is 
the poetry of horticulture ; it is Art prac- 
ticing the wise and gracious patience of 
Nature, and offering to the Market a Sum- 
mer Sweeting of the Hesperides. 

The possessor of this luscious realm at 
once took my friend’s case into considera- 
tion ; he listened, the owner of a hundred 
horses, with gentle indulgence to the shape- 
less desires of a man whose wildest dream 
was one horse. At the end he said, “I see 
you want a horse that can take care of 
himself.” 

“No,” replied my friend, with the in- 
spiration of despair. “ I want a horse 
that can take care of me.” 

The good genius laughed, and turned 
the conversation. Neither he nor my 


BUYING A HORSE. 


131 


friend’s neighbor was a man of many 
words, and like taciturn people they talked 
in low tones. The three moved about the 
room and looked at the Hispano-Roman 
pictures ; they had a glass of sherry ; from 
time to time something was casually mur- 
mured about Frank. My friend felt that 
he was in good hands, and left the affair 
to them. It ended in a visit to the stable, 
where it appeared that this gentleman 
had no horse to sell among his hundred 
which exactly met my friend’s want, but 
that he proposed to lend him Frank while 
a certain other animal was put in training 
for the difficult office he required of a 
horse. One of the men was sent for 
Frank, and in the mean time my friend 
was shown some gaunt and graceful thor- 
oughbreds, and taught to see the difference 
between them and the plebeian horse. 
But Frank, though no thoroughbred, 
eclipsed these patricians when he came. 
He had a little head, and a neck gallantly 


132 


BUYING A HORSE. 


arched; he was black and plump and 
smooth, and though he carried himself 
with a petted air, and was a dandy to the 
tips of his hooves, his knowing eye was 
kindly. He turned it upon my friend 
with the effect of understanding his case at 
a glance. 

It was in this way that for the rest of 
the long, lovely summer peace was re- 
established in his heart. There was no 
question of buying or selling Frank; there 
were associations that endeared him be- 
yond money to his owner ; but my friend 
could take him without price. The situa- 
tion had its humiliation for a man who had 
been arrogantly trying to buy a horse, but 
he submitted with grateful meekness, and 
with what grace Heaven granted him ; 
and Frank gayly entered upon the pecul- 
iar duties of his position. His first duty 
was to upset all preconceived notions of 
the advantage of youth in a horse. Frank 
was not merely not coming seven or nine, 


BUYING A HORSE. 


138 


but his age was an even number, — he was 
sixteen ; and it was his owner’s theory, 
which Frank supported, that if a horse was 
well used he was a good horse till twenty- 
five. 

The truth is that Frank looked like a 
young horse ; he was a dandy without any 
of the ghastliness which attends the preser- 
vation of youth in old beaux of another 
species. When my friend drove him in 
the rehabilitated phaeton he felt that the 
turn-out was stylish, and he learned to 
consult certain eccentricities of Frank’s in 
the satisfaction of his pride. One of these 
was a high reluctance to be passed on the 
road. Frank was as lazy a horse — but 
lazy in a self-respectful, aesthetic way — as 
ever was ; yet if he heard a vehicle at no 
matter how great distance behind him (and 
he always heard it before his driver), he 
brightened with resolution and defiance, 
and struck out with speed that made com- 
petition difficult. If my friend found that 


134 


BUYING A HORSE. 


the horse behind was likely to pass Frank, 
he made a merit of holding him in. If 
they met a team, he lay back in his phae- 
ton, and affected not to care to be going 
faster than a walk, any way. 

One of the things for which he chiefly 
prized Frank was his skill in backing and 
turning. He is one of those men who be- 
come greatly perturbed when required to 
back and turn a vehicle ; he cannot tell 
(till too late) whether he ought to pull the 
right rein in order to back to the left, or 
vice versa ; he knows, indeed, the princi- 
ple, but he becomes paralyzed in its appli- 
cation. Frank never was embarrassed, 
never confused. My friend had but to 
say, “ Back, Frank !” and Frank knew 
from the nature of the ground how far to 
back and which way to turn. He has 
thus extricated my friend from positions in 
which it appeared to him that no earthly 
power could relieve him. 

In going up hill Frank knew just when 


BUYING A HORSE. 


135 


to give himself a rest, and at what moment 
to join the party in looking about and en- 
joying the prospect. He was also an adept 
in scratching off flies, and had a precision 
in reaching an insect anywhere in his van 
with one of his rear hooves which few of 
us attain in slapping mosquitoes. This ac- 
tion sometimes disquieted persons in the 
phaeton, but Frank knew perfectly well 
what he was about, and if harm had hap- 
pened to the people under his charge my 
friend was sure that Frank could have 
done anything short of applying arnica 
and telegraphing to their friends. His 
varied knowledge of life and his long ex- 
perience had satisfied him that there were 
very few things to be afraid of in this 
world. Such womanish weaknesses as shy- 
ing and starting were far from him, and he 
regarded the boisterous behayior of loco- 
motives with indifference. He had not, 
indeed, the virtue of one horse offered to my 
friend’s purchase, of standing, unmoved, 


136 


BUYING A HORSE. 


with his nose against a passing express 
train ; but he was certainly not afraid of 
the cars. 

Frank was by no means what Mr. Em- 
erson calls a mush of concession ; he was 
not merely amianle ; he had his moments 
of self-assertion, his touches of asperity. 
It was not safe to pat his nose, like the 
erring Billy’s ; he was apt to bring his 
handsome teeth together in proximity to 
the caressing hand with a sharp click and 
a sarcastic grin. Not that he ever did, or 
ever would really bite. So, too, when left 
to stand long under fly-haunted cover, he 
he would start off afterwards with alarm- 
ing vehemence; and he objected to the 
saddle. On the only occasion when any 
of my friend’s family mounted him, he 
trotted gayly over the grass towards the 
house, with the young gentleman on his 
back ; then, without warning, he stopped 
short, a slight tremor appeared to pass 
over him, and his rider continued the ex- 


BUYING A HORSE. 


137 


cursion some ten feet farther, alighting 
lump-wise on a bunch of soft turf which 
Frank had selected for his reception. 

The summer passed, and in the comfort 
of Frank’s possession my friend had al- 
most abandoned the idea of ever returning 
him to his owner. He had thoughts of 
making the loan permanent, as something 
on the whole preferable to a purchase. 
The drives continued quite into December, 
over roads as smooth and hard as any in 
June, and the air was delicious. ^The first 
snow brought the suggestion of sleighing ; 
but that cold weather about Christmas dis- 
persed these gay thoughts, and restored 
my friend to virtue. Word came from the 
stable that Frank’s legs were swelling 
from standing so long without going out, 
and my friend resolved to part with an 
animal for which he had no use. I do not 
praise him for this ; it was no more than 
his duty; but I record his action in order 
to account for the fact that he is again 


138 


BUYING A HORSE. 


without a horse, and now, with the open- 
ing of the fine weather, is beginning once 
more to think of buying one. 

But he is in no mood of arrogant con- 
fidence. He has satisfied himself that 
neither love nor money is alone adequate 
to the acquisition : the fates also must 
favor it. The horse which Frank’s owner 
lias had in training may or may not be 
just the horse he wants. He does not 
know ; he humbly waits ; and he trembles 
at the alternative of horses, mystically 
summoned from space, and multitudin- 
ously advancing upon him, parrot-mouthed, 
pony-gaited, tender for’a’d, and traveling 
wide behind. 



/ 



FLITTING. 





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FLITTING. 


WOULD not willingly repose upon 
the friendship of a man whose local 
attachments are weak. I should 
not demand of my intimate that he have 
a yearning for the homes of his ances- 
tors, or even the scenes of his own boy- 
flood ; that is not in American nature ; on 
the contrary, he is but a poor creature who 
does not hate the village where he was 
born ; yet a sentiment for the place where 
one has lived tw T o or three years, the hotel 
where one has spent a week, the sleeping 
car in which one has ridden from Albany 
to Buffalo, — so much I should think it 
well to exact from my friend in proof 



142 


FLITTING. 


of that sensibility and constancy without 
which true friendship does not exist. So 
much I am ready to yield on my own 
part to a friend’s demand, and I profess to 
have all the possible regrets for Benicia 
Street, now I have left it. Over its defi- 
ciencies I cast a veil of decent oblivion, and 
shall always try to look upon its worthy 
and consoling aspects, which were far the 
more numerous. It was never otherwise, 
I imagine, than an ideal region in very 
great measure ; and if the reader whom I 
have sometimes seemed to direct thither, 
should seek it out, he would hardly find 
my Benicia Street by the city sign-board. 
Yet this is not wholly because it was an 
ideal locality, but because much of its re- 
ality has now become merely historical, a 
portion of the tragical poetry of the past. 
Many of the vacant lots abutting upon 
Benicia and the intersecting streets flour- 
ished up, during the four years we knew 
it, into fresh-painted wooden houses, and 


FLITTING. 


143 


the time came to be when one might have 
looked in vain for the abandoned hoop- 
skirts which used to decorate the desira- 
ble building-sites. The lessening pastur- 
age also reduced the herds which formerly 
fed in the vicinity, and at last we caught 
the tinkle of the cow-bells only as the cat- 
tle were driven past to remoter meadows. 
And one autumn afternoon two laborers, 
hired by the city, came and threw up an 
earthwork on the opposite side of the 
street, which they said was a sidewalk, 
and would add to the value of property in 
the neighborhood. Not being dressed with 
coal-ashes, however, during the winter, the 
sidewalk vanished next summer under a 
growth of rag-weed, and hid the increased 
values with it, and it is now an even ques- 
tion whether this monument of municipal 
grandeur will finally be held by Art or re- 
sumed by Nature, — who indeed has a per- 
petual motherly longing for her own, and 
may be seen in all outlying and suburban 


144 


FLITTING. 


places, pathetically striving to steal back 
any neglected bits of ground and conceal 
them under her skirts of tattered and shab- 
by verdure. But whatever is the event 
of this contest, and whatever the other 
changes wrought in the locality, it has not 
yet been quite stripped of the characteris- 
tic charms which first took our hearts, and 
which have been duly celebrated in these 
pages. 

When the new house was chosen, we 
made preparations to leave the old one, 
but preparations so gradual, that, if we 
had cared much more than we did, we 
might have suffered greatly by the prolon- 
gation of the agony. We proposed to our- 
selves to escape the miseries of moving by 
transferring the contents of one room at a 
time, and if we did not laugh incredulously 
at people who said we had better have it 
over at once and be done with it, it was 
because we respected their feelings, and 
not because we believed them. We took 


FLITTING. 


145 


up one carpet after another ; one wall after 
another we stripped of its pictures ; we sent 
away all the books to begin with ; and by 
this subtle and ingenious process, we re- 
duced ourselves to the discomfort of living 
in no house at all, as it were, and of being 
at home in neither one place nor the other. 
Yet the logic of our scheme remained per- 
fect; and I do not regret its failure in 
practice, for if we had been ever so loath 
to quit the old house, its inhospitable bar- 
renness would finally have hurried us forth. 
In fact, does not life itself in some such 
fashion dismantle its tenement until it is at 
last forced out of the uninhabitable place ? 
Ar3 not the poor little comforts and pleas- 
ures and ornaments removed one by one, 
till life, if it would be saved, must go too? 
We took a lesson from the teachings of 
mortality, which are* so rarely heeded, and 
we lingered over our moving. We made 
the process so gradual, indeed, that I do 
not feel myself all gone yet from the famil- 


146 


FLITTING. 


iar work-room, and for aught I can say, I 
still write there ; and as to the guest cham- 
ber, it is so densely peopled by those it has 
lodged that it will never quite be emptied 
of them. Friends also are yet in the 
habit of calling in the parlor, and talking 
with us ; and will the children never come 
off the stairs ? Does life, our high exem- 
plar, leave so much behind as we did ? Is 
this what fills the world with ghosts ? 

In the getting ready to go, nothing hurt 
half so much as the sight of the little 
girl packing her doll’s things for removal. 
The trousseaux of all those elegant creat- 
ures, the wooden, the waxen, the biscuit, 
the india-rubber, were carefully assorted, 
and arranged in various small drawers and 
boxes; their house was thoughtfully put 
in order and locked for transportation; 
their innumerable broken sets of dishes 
were packed in paper and set out upon 
the floor, a heart-breaking little basketful. 
Nothing real in this world is so affecting 


FLITTING. 


147 


as some image of reality, and this travesty 
of our own flitting was almost intolerable. 
1 will not pretend to sentiment about any- 
thing else, for everything else had in it 
the element of self-support belonging to 
all actual afflictions. When the day of 
moving finally came, and the furniture 
wagon, which ought to have been only a 
shade less dreadful to us than a hearse, 
drew up at our door, our hearts were of a 
ISeronian hardness. 

“ Were I Diogenes,” says wrathful 
Charles Lamb in one of his letters, “ I 
would not move out of a kilderkin into a 
hogshead, though the first had nothing but 
small beer in it, and the second reeked 
claret.” I fancy this loathing of the transi- 
tionary state came in great part from the 
rude and elemental nature of the means 
of moving in Laijib’s day. In our own 
time, in Charlesbridge at least, everything 
is so perfectly c< mived, that it is in 
some ways a pleasant excitement to move ; 


148 


FLITTING. 


though I do not commend the diversion to 
any but people of entire leisure, for it can- 
not be denied that it is, at any rate, an in- 
terruption to work. But little is broken, 
little is defaced, nothing is heedlessly out- 
raged or put to shame. Of course there 
are in every house certain objects of com- 
fort and even ornament which in a state 
of repose derive a sort of dignity from 
being cracked, or scratched, or organi- 
cally debilitated, and give an idea of an- 
cestral possession and of long descent to 
the actual owner ; and you must not hope 
that this venerable quality will survive 
their public exposure upon the furniture 
wagon. There it instantly perishes, like 
the consequence of some country notable 
huddled and hustled about in the graceless 
and ignorant tumult of a great city. To 
tell the truth, the number of tilings that 
turn shabby under the ordeal of moving 
strikes a pang of unaccustomed poverty 
to the heart which, loving all mauner of 


FLITTING. 


149 


makeshifts, is rich even in its dilapida- 
tions. For the time you feel degraded by 
the spectacle of that forlornness, and if 
you are a man of spirit, you try to sneak 
out of association with it in the mind of 
the passer-by; you keep scrupulously in- 
doors, or if a fancied exigency obliges 
you to go back and forth between the old 
house and the new, you seek obscure by- 
ways remote from the great street down 
which the wagon flaunts your ruin and de- 
cay, and time your arrivals and departures 
so as to have the air of merely dropping 
in at either place. This consoles you ; but 
it deceives no one; for the man who is 
moving is unmistakably stamped with 
transition. 

Yet the momentary eclipse of these 
things is not the worst. It is momentary ; 
for if you will but plant them in kindly cor- 
ners and favorable exposures of the new 
house, a mould of respectability will grad- 
ually overspread them again, and they will 


150 


FLITTING. 


once more account for their presence by the 
air of having been a long time in the fam- 
ily ; but there is danger that in the first 
moments of mortification you will be 
tempted to replace them with new and 
costly articles. Even the best of tho old 
things are nothing to boast of in the hard, 
unpitying light to which they are exposed, 
and a difficult and indocile spirit of extrav- 
agance is evoked in the least profuse. 
Because of this fact alone I should not 
commend the diversion of moving save to 
people of very ample means as well as per- 
fect leisure ; there are more reasons than 
the misery of flitting why the dweller in 
the kilderkin should not covet the hogs- 
head reeking of claret. 

But the grosser misery of moving is, as 
1 have hinted, vastly mitigated by modern 
science, and what remains of it one may 
use himself to with no tremendous effort. 
I have found that in the dentist’s chair, 
— that ironically luxurious seat, cushioned 


FLITTING. 


151 


in satirical suggestion of impossible repose, 
— after a certain initial period of clawing, 
filing, scraping, and punching, one’s nerves 
accommodate themselves to the torment ; 
and one takes almost an objective interest 
in the operation of tooth-filling ; and in 
like manner, after two or three wagon-loads 
of your household stuff have passed down 
the public street, and all your morbid asso- 
ciations with them have been desecrated, 
you begin almost to like it. Yet I cannot 
regard this abandon as a perfectly healthy 
emotion, and I do not counsel my reader to 
moTmt himself upon the wagon and ride to 
and fro even once, for afterwards the re- 
membrance of such ran excess will grieve 
him. 

Of course, I meant to imply by this that 
moving sometimes comes to an end, though 
it is not easy to believe so while moving. 
The time really arrives when you sit down 
in your new house, and amid whatever 
disorder take your first meal there. This 


152 


FLITTING. 


meal is pretty sure to be that gloomy tea, 
that loathly repast of butter and toast, 
and some kind of cake, with which the 
soul of the early-dining American is daily 
cast down between the hours of six and 
seven in the evening ; and instinctively you 
compare it with the last meal you took in 
your old house, seeking in vain to decide 
whether this is more dispiriting than that. 
At any rate that was not at all the meal 
which the last meal in any house which 
has been a home ought to be in fact, and 
is in books. It was hurriedly cooked ; it 
was served upon fugitive and irregular 
crockery ; and it was eaten in deplorable 
disorder, with the professional movers 
waiting for the table outside the dining- 
room. It ought to have been an act of se- 
rious devotion ; it was nothing but an ex- 
piation. It should have been a solemn 
commemoration of all past dinners in the 
place, an invocation to their pleasant ap- 
paritions. But I, for my part, could not 


FLITTING. 


153 


recall these at all, though now I think of 
them with the requisite pathos, and I know 
they were perfectly worthy of remem- 
brance. I salute mournfully the compa- 
nies that have sat down at dinner there, 
for they are sadly scattered now ; some 
beyond seas, some beyond the narrow 
gulf, so impassably deeper to our longing 
and tenderness than the seas. But more 
sadly still I hail the host himself, and de- 
sire to know of him if literature was not 
somehow a gayer science in those days, and 
if his peculiar kind of drolling had not 
rather more heart in it then. In an odd, 
not quite expressible fashion, something of 
him seems dispersed abroad and perished 
in the guests he loved. I trust, of course, 
that all will be restored to him when he 
turns — as every man past thirty feels he 
may when he likes, and has the time — 
and resumes his youth. Or if this feeling 
is only a part of the great tacit promise of 
eternity, I am all the more certain of his 
getting back his losses. 


154 


FLITTING. 


I say that now these apposite reflections 
occur to me with a sufficient ease, but that 
upon the true occasion for them they were 
absent. So, too, at the first meal in the 
new house, there was none of that desira- 
ble sense of setting up a family altar, but a 
calamitous impression of irretrievable up- 
heaval, in honor of which sackcloth and 
ashes seemed the only wear. Yet even 
the next day the Lares and Penates had 
regained something of their wonted cheer- 
fulness, and life had begun again with the 
first breakfast. In fact, I found myself al- 
ready so firmly established that, meeting 
the furniture cart which had moved me the 
day before, I had the face to ask the driver 
whom they were turning out of house and 
home, as if my own flitting were a memory 
of the far-off past. 

Not that I think the professional mover 
expects to be addressed in a joking mood. 
I have a fancy that he cultivates a serious 
spirit himself, in which he finds it easy to 


FLITTING. 


155 


sympathize with any melancholy on the part 
of the moving family. There is a slight 
flavor of undertaking in his manner, which 
is nevertheless full of a subdued firmness 
very consoling and supporting ; though the 
life that he leads must be a troubled and 
uncheerful one, trying alike to the muscles 
and the nerves. How often must he have 
been charged by anxious and fluttered la- 
dies to be very careful of that basket of 
china, and those vases ! IIow often must 
he have been vexed by the ignorant terrors 
of gentlemen asking if he thinks that the 
library-table, poised upon the top of his 
load, will hold ! His planning is not in- 
fallible, and when he breaks something 
uncommonly precious, what does a man of 
his sensibility do ? Is the demolition of 
old homes really distressing to him, or is 
he inwardly buoyed up by hopes of other 
and better homes for the people he moves ? 
Can there be any ideal of moving? Does 
he, perhaps, feel a pride in an artfully con- 


156 


FLITTING. 


structed load, and has he something like 
an artist’s pang in unloading it ? Is there 
a choice in families to be moved, and are 
some worse or better than others ? Next 
to the lawyer and the doctor, it appears to 
me that the professional mover holds the 
most confidential relations towards his fel- 
low-men. He is let into all manner of 
little domestic secrets and subterfuges ; I 
dare say he knows where half the people 
in town keep their skeleton, and what 
manner of skeleton it is. As for me, 
when I saw him making towards a certain 
closet door, I planted myself firmly against 
it. He smiled intelligence ; he knew the 
skeleton was there, and that it would be 
carried to the new house after dark. 

I began by saying that I should wish 
my friend to have some sort of local at- 
tachment ; but I supposed it must be 
owned that this sentiment, like pity, and 
the modern love-passion, is a thing so’ 
largely produced by culture that nature 


FLITTING. 


157 


seems to have little or nothing to do with 
it. The first men were homeless wan- 
derers ; the patriarchs dwelt in tents, and 
shifted their place to follow the pasturage, 
without a sigh ; and for children — the 
pre-historic, the antique people, of our day 
— moving is a rapture. The last dinner 
in the old house, the first tea in the new, 
so doleful to their elders, are partaken of 
by them with joyous riot. Their shrill 
trebles echo gleefully from the naked 
walls and floors ; they race up and down 
the carpetless stairs ; they menace the dis- 
located mirrors and crockery ; through all 
the chambers of desolation they frolic with 
a gayety indomitable save by bodily ex- 
haustion. If the reader is of a moving fam- 
ily, — and so he is as he is an American, — 
he can recall the zest he found during 
childhood in the moving which had for his 
elders — poor victims of a factitious and 
conventional sentiment ! — only the salt 
and bitterness of tears. His spirits never 


158 


FLITTING. 


fell till the carpets were down ; no sorrow 
touched him till order returned ; if Heaven 
so blessed him that his bed was made upon 
the floor for one night, the angels visited 
his dreams. Why, then, is the mature 
soul, however sincere and humble, not 
only grieved but mortified by flitting? 
Why cannot one move without feeling the 
great public eye fixed in pitying contempt 
upon him ? This sense of abasement 
seems to be something quite inseparable 
from the act, which is often laudable, and 
in every way wise and desirable ; and he 
whom it has afflicted is the first to turn, 
after his own establishment, and look with 
scornful compassion upon the overflowing 
furniture wagon as it passes. But I im- 
agine that Abraham’s neighbors, when he 
struck his tent, and packed his parlor and 
kitchen furniture upon his camels, and 
started off with Mrs. Sarah to seek a new 
camping-ground, did not smile at the pro- 
cession, or find it worthy of ridicule or 


FLITTING. 


159 


lament. Nor did Abraham, once settled, 
and reposing in the cool of the evening at 
the door of his tent, gaze sarcastically 
upon the moving of any of his brother 
patriarchs. 

To some such philosophical serenity we 
shall also return, I suppose, when we have 
wisely theorized life in our climate, and 
shall all have become nomads once more, 
following June and October up and down 
and across the continent, and not suffering 
the full malice of the winter and sum- 
mer anywhere. But as yet, the derision 
that attaches to moving attends even the 
goer-out of town, and the man of many 
trunks and a retinue of linen-suited wom- 
ankind is a pitiable and despicable object 
to all the other passengers at the railroad 
station and on the steamboat wharf. 

This is but one of many ways in 
which mere tradition oppresses us. I pro- 
test that as moving is now managed in 
Chari esbridge, there is hardly any reason 


160 


FLITTING. 


why the master or mistress of the house- 
hold should put hand to anything ; but it 
is a tradition that they shall dress them- 
selves in their worst, as for heavy work, 
and shall go about very shabby for at least 
a day before and a day after the transi- 
tion. It is a kind of sacrifice, I suppose, 
to a venerable ideal ; and I would never 
be the first to omit it. In others I ob- 
serve that this vacant and ceremonious zeal 
is in proportion to an incapacity to do 
anything that happens really to be re- 
quired ; and I believe that the trull y sage 
person would devote moving-day to paying 
visits of ceremony in his finest clothes. 

As to the house which one has left, I 
think it would be preferable to have it 
occupied as soon as possible after one’s 
Hitting. Pilgrimages to the dismantled 
shrine are certainly to be avoided by the 
friend of cheerfulness. A day’s absence 
and emptiness wholly change its character, 
though the familiarity continues, with a 



“ Vacant and ceremonious zeal.” 
























































































- 





































































FLITTING. 


163 


ghastly difference, as in the beloved face 
that the life has left. It is not at all the 
vacant house it was when you came first 
to look at it: for then hopes peopled it, 
and now memories. In that golden prime 
you had long been boarding, and any place 
in which you could keep house seemed ut- 
terly desirable. How distinctly you recall 
that wet day, or that fair day, on which 
you went through it and decided that this 
should be the guest chamber and that the 
family room, and what could be done with 
the little back attic in a pinch ! The chil- 
dren could play in the dining-room ; and 
to be sure the parlor was rather small if 
you wanted to have company ; but then, 
who would ever want to give a party ? and 
besides, the pump in the kitchen was a com- 
pensation for anything. How lightly the 
dumb waiter ran up and down, — 

“ Qual piuma al vento! ” 

you sang, in very glad-heartedness. Then 
estimates of the number of yards of carpet- 


164 


FLITTING. 


ing ; and how you could easily save the 
cost from the difference between boarding 
and house-keeping. Adieu, Mrs. Brown ! 
henceforth let your “ desirable apartments, 
en suite or single, furnished or unfurnished, 
to gentlemen only ! ” — this married pair is 
about to escape forever from your extor- 
tions. 

Well, if the years passed without making 
us sadder, should we be much the wiser for 
their going ? Now you know, little couple, 
that there are extortions in this wicked 
world beside Mrs. Brown’s ; and some 
other things. But if you go into the empty 
house that was lately your home, you will 
not, I believe, be haunted by these sordid 
disappointments, for the place should evoke 
other regrets and meditations. Truly, 
though the great fear has not come upon 
you here, in this room you may have known 
moments when it seemed very near, and 
when the quick, fevered breathings of the 
little one timed your own heart-beats. To 


FLITTING. 


165 


that door, with many other missives of joy 
and pain, came haply the dispatch which 
hurried you off to face your greatest sor- 
row — came by night, like a voice of God, 
speaking and warning, and making all your 
work idle and your aims foolish. These 
walls have answered, how many times, to 
your laughter ; they have had friendly 
ears for the trouble that seemed to grow 
by Utterance. You have sat upon the 
threshold so many summer days ; so many 
winter mornings you have seen the snows 
drifted high about it ; so often your step 
has been light and heavy upon it. There 
is the study, where your magnificent per- 
formances were planned, and your exceed- 
ing small performances were achieved ; 
hither you hurried with the first criticism 
of your first book, and read it with the 
rapture that nothing but a love-letter and 
a favorable review can awaken. Out there 
is the well-known humble prospect, that 
was commonly but a vista into dream-land ; 
on the other hand is the pretty grove, — 


166 


FLITTING. 


its leaves now a little painted with the au- 
tumn, and faltering to their fall. 

Yes, the place must always be sacred, 
but painful^ sacred ; and, I say again, one 
should not go near it unless as a penance. 
If the reader will suffer me the confidence, 
I will own that there is always a pang in 
the past which is more than any pleasure 
it can give, and I believe that he, if he were 
perfectly honest, — as Heaven forbid I or 
any one should be, — would also confess as 
much. There is no house to which one 
would return, having left it, though it were 
the hogshead out of which one had moved 
into a kilderkin ; for those associations 
whose perishing leaves us free, and pre- 
serves to us what little youth we have, were 
otherwise perpetuated to our burden and 
bondage. Let some one else, who has also 
escaped from his past, have your old house ; 
he will find it new and untroubled by mem- 
ories, while you, under another roof, enjoy 
a present that borders only upon the fut- 
ure. 



THE MOUSE. 















\ 


THE MOUSE. 


ISHING to tell the story of our 
Mouse, because I think it illustrates 
some amusing traits of character in 
a certain class of Italians, I explain at once 
that he was not a mouse, but a man so 
called from his wretched, trembling little 
manner, his fugitive expression, and peaked 
visage. 

He first appeared to us on the driver’s 
seat of that carriage in which we posted so 
splendidly one spring-time from Padua to 
Ponte Lagoscuro. But though he mounted 
to his place just outside the city gate, we 
did not regard him much, nor, indeed, 
observe what a mouse he was until the 



170 


THE MOUSE. 


driver stopped to water his horses near 
Battaglia, and the Mouse got down to 
stretch his forlorn little legs. Then I got 
down too, and bade him good-day, and 
told him it was a very hot day — for he 
was a mouse apparently so plunged in 
wretchedness that I doubted if he knew 
what kind of day it was. 

When I had spoken, he began to praise 
(in the wary manner of the Venetians 
when they find themselves in the company 
of a foreigner who does not look like an 
Englishman) the Castle of the Obizzi near 
by, which is now the country-seat of the 
ex-Duke of Modena ; and he presently 
said something to imply that he thought 
me a German. 

u But I am not a German,” said I. 

“ As many excuses,” said the Mouse 
sadly, but with evident relief ; and then 
began to talk more freely, and of the evil 
times. 

“ Are you going all the way with us to 
Florence ? ” I asked. 


THE MOUSE. 171 

“ No, signor, to Bologna ; from there to 
Ancona.” 

“Have you ever been in Venice? We 
are just coming from there.” 

“ Oh, yes.” 

“ It is a beautiful place. Do you like 
it?” 

n Sufficiently. But one does not enjoy 
himself very well there.” 

“ But I thought Venice interesting.” 

“ Sufficiently, signor. Maf” said the 
Mouse, shrugging his shoulders, and put- 
ting on the air of being luxuriously fas- 
tidious in his choice of cities, “ the water 
is so bad in Venice.” 

The Mouse is dressed in a heavy winter 
overcoat, and has no garment to form a 
compromise with his shirt-sleeves, if he 
should wish to render the weather more 
endurable by throwing off the surtout. In 
spite of his momentary assumption of con- 
sequence, I suspect that his coat is in the 
Monte di Pieta. It comes out directly 


172 


THE MOUSE. 


that he is a ship-carpenter who has worked 
in the Arsenal of Venice, and at the ship- 
yards in Trieste. 

But there is no work any more. He 
went to Trieste lately to get a job on the 
three frigates which the Sultan had ordered 
to be built there. Ma ! After all, the 
frigates are to be built in Marseilles in- 
stead. There is nothing. And everything 
is so dear. In Venetia you spend much 
and gain little. Perhaps there is work at 
Ancona. 

By this time the horses are watered ; 
the Mouse regains his seat, and we almost 
forget him, till he jumps from his place, 
just before we reach the hotel in Kovigo, 
and disappears — down the first hole in 
the side of a house, perhaps. He might 
have done much worse, and spent the 
night at the hotel, as we did. 

The next morning at four o’clock, when 
we start, he is on the box again, nibbling 
bread and cheese, and glancing furtively 


THE MOUSE. 


173 


back at ns to say good morning. He lias 
little twinkling black eyes, just like a 
mouse, and a sharp mustache, and sharp 
tuft on his chin — as like Victor Emanu- 
el’s as a mouse’s tuft can be. 

The cold morning air seems to shrivel 
him, and he crouches into a little gelid ball 
on the seat beside the driver, while we 
wind along the Po on the smooth gray 
road ; while the twilight lifts slowly from 
the distances of field and vineyard ; while 
the black boats of the Po, with their gaunt 
white sails, show spectrally through the 
mists ; while the trees and the bushes 
break into innumerable voice, and the 
birds are glad of another day in Italy; 
while the peasant drives his mellow-eyed, 
dun oxen afield ; while his wife comes in 
her scarlet bodice to the door, and the 
children’s faces peer out from behind her 
skirts ; while the air freshens, the east 
flushes, and the great miracle is wrought 
anew. 


174 


THE MOUSE. 


Once again, before we reach the ferry 
of the Po, the Mouse leaps down and dis- 
appears as mysteriously as at Rovigo. We 
see him no more till we meet in the station 
on the other side of the river, where we 
hear him bargaining long and earnestly 
with the ticket-seller for a third-class pas- 
sage to Bologna. He fails to get it, I 
think, at less than the usual rate, for he 
retires from the contest more shrunken and 
forlorn than ever, and walks up and down 
the station, startled at a word, shocked at 
any sudden noise. 

For curiosity, I ask how much he paid 
for crossing the river, mentioning the fab- 
ulous sum it had cost us. 

It appears that he had paid sixteen soldi 
only. “ What could they do when a man 
was in misery ? 1 had nothing else.” 

Even while thus betraying his poverty, 
the Mouse did not beg, and we began to 
respect his poverty. In a little while we 
pitied it, witnessing the manner in which 


THE MOUSE. 175 

he sat down on the edge of a chair, with a 
smile of meek desperation. 

It is a more serious case when an artisan 
is out of work in the Old World than one 
can understand in the New. There the 
struggle for bread is so fierce and the com- 
petition so great ; and then, a man bred to 
one trade cannot turn his hand to another 
as in America. Even the rudest and least 
skilled labor has more to do it than are 
wanted. The Italians are very good to 
the poor, but the tradesman out of work 
must become a beggar before charity can 
help him. 

We, who are poor enough to be wise, 
consult foolishly together concerning the 
Mouse. It blesses him that gives, and him 
that takes — this business of charity. And 
then, there is something irresistibly relish- 
ing and splendid in the consciousness of 
being the instrument of a special provi- 
dence! Have I all my life admired those 
beneficent characters in novels and come- 


176 


THE MOUSE. 


dies who rescue innocence, succor distress, 
and go about pressing gold into the palm 
of poverty, and telling it to take it and be 
happy; and now shall I reject an occasion, 
made to my hand, for emulating them in 
real life ? 

“I think I will give the Mouse five 
francs,” I say. 

“Yes, certainly.” 

“ But 1 will be prudent,” I continue. “ I 
will not give him this money. I will tell 
him it is a loan which he may pay me back 
again whenever he can. In this way I 
shall relieve him now, and furnish him an 
incentive to economy.” 

I call to the Mouse, and he runs tremu- 
lously toward me. 

“ Have you friends in Ancona? ” 

“ No, signor.” 

“ How much money have you left ? ” 

He shows me three soldi. “ Enough 
for a coffee.” 

“ And then ? ” 


THE MOUSE. 


177 


“ God knows.” 

So I give him the five francs, and ex* 
plain my little scheme of making it a loan, 
and not a gift ; and then I give him my 
address. 

He does not appear to understand the 
scheme of the loan ; but he takes the 
money, and is quite stunned by his good 
fortune. He thanks me absently, and goes 
and shows the piece to the guards, with a 
smile that illumines and transfigures his 
whole person. At Bologna, he has come 
to his senses ; he loads me with blessings, 
he is ready to weep ; he reverences me, 
he wishes me a good voyage, endless pros- 
perity, and innumerable days ; and takes 
the train for Ancona. 

“ Ah, ah ! ” I congratulate myself, — 
“is it not a fine thing to be the instrument 
of a special providence ? ” 

It is pleasant to think of the Mouse 
during all that journey, and if we are 
never so tired, it rests us to say, “ I won- 


178 


THE MOUSE. 


der where the Mouse is by this time ? ” 
When we get home, and coldly count up 
our expenses, we rejoice in the five francs 
lent to the Mouse. “ And I know he will 
pay it back if ever he can,” I say. “ That 
was a Mouse of integrity.” 

Two weeks later comes a comely young 
woman, with a young child — a child 
strong on its legs, a child which tries to 
open everything in the room, which wants 
to pull the cloth off the table, to throw 
itself out of the open window — a child of 
which I have never seen the peer for rest- 
lessness and curiosity. This young woman 
has been directed to call on me as a person 
likely to pay her way to Ferrara. 

“ But who sent you ? But, in fine, why 
should I pay your way to Ferrara? I have 
never seen you before.” 

“ My husband, whom you benefited on 
his way to Ancona, sent me. Here is his 
letter and the card you gave him.” 

I call out to my fellow-victim, — “ My 
dear, here is news of the Mouse ! ” 


THE MOUSE. 179 

“ Don’t tell me he ’s sent you that money 
already ! ” 

“ Not at all. He has sent me his wife 
and child, that I may forward them to him 
at Ferrara, out of my goodness, and the 
boundless prosperity which has followed 
his good wishes — I, who am a great 
signor in his eyes, and an insatiable giver 
of five-franc pieces — the instrument of a 
perpetual special providence. The Mouse 
has found work at Ferrara, and his wife 
comes here from Trieste. As for the rest, 
I am to send her to him, as I said.” 

“ You are deceived,” I say solemnly to 
the Mouse’s wife. “ I am not a rich man. 
I lent your husband five francs because he 
had nothing. I am sorry ; but I cannot 
spare twenty florins to send you to Fer- 
rara. If one will help you ? ” 

“Thanks the same,” said the young 
woman, who was well dressed enough ; 
and blessed me, and gathered up her child, 
and went her way. 


180 


THE MOUSE. 


But her blessing did not lighten my 
heart, depressed and troubled by so strange 
an end to my little scheme of a beneficent 
loan. After all, perhaps the Mouse may 
have been as keenly disappointed as my- 
self. With the ineradicable idea of the 
Italians, that persons who speak English 
are wealthy by nature, and tutti originally 
it was not such an absurd conception of 
the case to suppose that if I had lent him 
five francs once, I should like to do it con- 
tinually. Perhaps he may yet pay back 
the loan with usury. But I doubt it. In 
the mean time, I am far from blaming the 
Mouse. I merely feel that there is a mis- 
understanding, which I can pardon if he 
can. 




A YEAR IN A VENETIAN 

PALACE. ' 























A YEAR IN A VENETIAN 
PALACE. 

— * — 

KF|pjHE last of four years which it was 
El.llli our fortune to live in the city of 
Venice was passed under the roof 
of one of her most beautiful and memora- 
ble palaces, namely, the Palazzo Giustini- 
ani, whither we went, as has been told in 
an earlier chapter of this book, to escape 
the encroaching nepotism of Giovanna, the 
flower of serving-women. The experience 
now, in Cambridge, Mass., refuses to con- 
sort with ordinary remembrances, and lias 
such a fantastic preference for the com- 
pany of rather vivid and circumstantial 
dreams, that it is with no very strong hope 


184 A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE. 


of making it seem real that I shall venture 
to speak of it. 

The Giustiniani were a family of patri- 
cians very famous during the times of a 
Republic that gave so many splendid 
names to history, and the race was pre- 
served to the honor and service of Saint 
Mark by one of the most romantic facts of 
his annals. During a war with the Greek 
Emperor in the twelfth century every 
known Giustiniani was slain, and the he- 
roic strain seemed lost forever. But the 
state that mourned them bethought itself 
of a half forgotten monk of their house, 
who was wasting his life in the Convent of 
San Nicolo ; he was drawn forth from this 
seclusion, and, the permission of Rome 
being won, he was married to the daughter 
of the reigning doge. From them de- 
scended the Giustiniani of after times, who 
still exist; indeed, in the year 1865 there 
came one day a gentleman of the family, 


A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE. 185 

and tried to buy from our landlord that 
part of the palace which we so humbly and 
insufficiently inhabited. It is said that as 
the unfrocked friar and his wife declined 
in life they separated, and as if in doubt 
of what had been done for the state through 
them, retired each into a convent, Giusti- 
niani going back to San Nicolo, and dying 
at last to the murmur of the Adriatic 
waves along the Lido’s sands. 

Next after this Giustiniani I like best 
to think of that latest hero of the family, 
who had the sad fortune to live when the 
ancient Republic fell at a threat of Napo- 
leon, and who alone among her nobles had 
the courage to meet with a manly spirit 
the insolent menaces of the conqueror. 
The Giustiniani governed Treviso for the 
Senate ; he refused, when Napoleon ordered 
him from his presence, to quit Treviso 
without the command of the Senate ; 
he flung back the taunts of bad faith cast 
upon the Venetians; and when Napoleon 


186 A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE. 


changed his tone from that of disdain to 
one of compliment, and promised that in 
the general disaster he was preparing for 
Venice, Giustiniani should be spared, the 
latter generously replied that he had been 
a friend of the French only because the 
Senate was so ; as to the immunity offered, 
all was lost to him in the loss of his coun- 
try, and he should blush for his wealth if 
it remained intact amidst the ruin of his 
countrymen. 

The family grew in riches and renown 
from age to age, and, some four centuries 
after the marriage of the monk, they 
reared the three beautiful Gothic palaces, 
in the noblest site on the Grand Canal, 
whence on one hand you can look down to 
the Rialto Bridge, and on the other far up 
towards the church of the Salute, and the 
Basin of Saint Mark. The architects 
were those Buoni, father and son, who did 
some of the most beautiful work on the 
Ducal Palace, and who wrought in an 


A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE. 187 

equal inspiration upon these homes of the 
Giustiniani, building the delicate Gothic 
arches of the windows, with their slender 
columns and their graceful balconies, and 
crowning all with the airy battlements. 

The largest of the three palaces became 
later the property of the Foscari family, 
and here dwelt with his father that un- 
happy Jacopo Foscari, who after thrice 
suffering torture by the state for a murder 
he never did, at last died in exile ; hither 
came the old Doge Foscari, who had con- 
sented to this cruel error of the state, and 
who after a life spent in its service was 
deposed and disgraced before his death ; 
and hither, when he lay dead, came re- 
morseful Venice, and claimed for sumptu- 
ous obsequies the dust which his widow 
yielded with bitter reproaches. Here the 
family faded away generation by genera- 
tion, till (according to the tale told us) 
early in this century, when the ultimate 
male survivor of the line had died, under 


188 A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE. 

a false name, in London, where he had 
been some sort of obscure actor, there 
were hut two old maiden sisters left, who, 
lapsing into imbecility, were shown to 
strangers by the rascal servants as the last 
of the Foscari ; and here in our time was 
quartered a regiment of Austrian troops, 
whose neatly pipe-clayed belts decorated 
the balconies on which the princely ladies 
of the house had rested their jeweled arms 
in other days. 

The Foscari added a story to the palace 
to distinguish it from the two other palaces 
Giustiniani, but these remain to the pres- 
ent day as they were originally planned. 
That in which we lived was called Palazzo 
Giustiniani of the Bishops, because one of 
the family, was the first patriarch of Ven- 
ice. After his death he was made a saint 
by the Pope ; and it is related that he was 
not only a very pious, but a very good man. 
In his last hours he admitted his beloved 
people to his chamber, where he meekly 


A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE. 189 

lay upon a pallet of straw, and' at the mo- 
ment he expired, two monks in the soli- 
tude of their cloister, heard an angelical 
harmony in the air : the clergy performed 
his obsequies not in black, funereal robes, 
but in white garments, and crowned with 
laurel, and bearing gilded torches, and al- 
though the patriarch had died of a malig- 
nant fever, his body was miraculously pre- 
served incorrupt during the sixty-five days 
that the obsequies lasted. The other branch 
of the family was called the Giustiniani of 
the Jewels, from the splendor of their 
dress ; but neither palace now shelters any 
of their magnificent race. The edifice on 
our right was exclusively occupied by a 
noble Viennese lady, who as we heard, — 
vaguely, in the right Venetian fashion, — 
had been a ballet-dancer in her youth, and 
who now in her matronly days dwelt apart 
from her husband, the Russian count, and 
had gondoliers in blue silk, and the finest 
gondola on the Grand Canal, but was 


190 A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE. 


a plump, florid lady, looking long past 
beauty, even as we saw her from our bal- 
cony. 

Our own palace — as we absurdly grew 
to call it — was owned and inhabited in a 
manner much more proper to modern Ven- 
ice, the proprietorship being about equally 
divided between our own landlord and a 
very well known Venetian painter, son of 
a painter still more famous. This artist 
was a very courteous old gentleman, who 
went with Italian and clock-like regularity 
every evening in summer to a certain caffe, 
where he seemed to make it a point of 
conscience to sip one sherbet, and to read 
the “Journal des Debats.” In his coming 
and going we met him so often that we be- 
came friends, and he asked us many times 
to visit him, and see his father’s pictures, 
and some famous frescos with which his 
part of the palace was adorned. It was a 
characteristic trait of our life, that though 
we constantly meant to avail ourselves of 


A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE. 191 


this kindness, we never did so. But we 
continued in the enjoyment of the beauti- 
ful garden, which this gentleman owned at 
the rear of the palace and on which our 
chamber windows looked. It was full of 
oleanders and roses, and other bright and 
odorous blooms, which we could enjoy per- 
fectly well without knowing their names; 
and I could hardly say whether the gar- 
den was more charming when it was in its 
summer glory, or when, on some rare win- 
ter day, a breath from the mountains had 
clothed its tender boughs and sprays with 
a light and evanescent flowering of snow. 
At any season the lofty palace walls rose 
over it, and shut it in a pensive seclusion 
which was loved by the old mother of the 
painter and by his elderly maiden sister. 
These often walked on its moss-grown 
paths, silent as the roses and oleanders to 
which one could have fancied the blossom 
of their youth had flown ; and sometimes 
there came to them there, grave, black- 


192 A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE. 


gowned priests, — for the painter’s was a 
devout family, — and talked with them in 
tones almost as tranquil as the silence was? 
save when one of the ecclesiastics placidly 
took snuff, — it is a dogma of the Church 
for priests to take snuff in Italy, — and 
thereafter, upon a prolonged search for his 
handkerchief, blew a resounding nose. So 
far as we knew, the garden walls circum- 
scribed the whole life of these ladies ; and 
I am afraid that such topics of this world 
as they touched upon with their priests 
must have been deplorably small. 

Their kinsman owned part of the story 
under us, and both of the stories above us ; 
he had the advantage of the garden over 
our landlord ; but he had not so grand a 
gondola-gate as we, and in some other re- 
spects I incline to think that our part of 
the edifice was the finer. It is certain that 
no mention is made of any such beautiful 
hall in the property of the painter as is 
noted in that of our landlord, by the his- 


A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE. 193 


torian of a “ Hundred Palaces of Venice/’ 
— a work for which I subscribed, and then 
for my merit was honored by a visit from 
the author, who read aloud to me in a deep 
and sonorous voice the annals of our tem- 
porary home. This hall occupied half the 
space of the whole floor ; but it was alto- 
gether surrounded by rooms of various 
shapes and sizes, except upon one side of 
its length, where it gave through Gothic 
windows of vari-colored glass, upon a small 
court below, — a green-mouldy little court, 
further dampened by a cistern, which had 
the usual curb of a single carven block of 
marble. The roof of this stately sola was 
traversed by a long series of painted raf- 
ters, which in the halls of nearly all Vene- 
tian palaces are left exposed, and painted 
or carved and gilded. A suite of stately 
rooms closed the hall from the Grand Ca- 
nal, and one of these formed our parlor ; 
on the side opposite the Gothic windows 
was a vast aristocratic kitchen, which, with 


194 A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE. 


its rows of shining coppers, its great chim- 
ney-place well advanced toward the middle 
of the floor, and its tall gloomy windows, 
still affects my imagination as one of the 
most patrician rooms which I ever saw ; 
at the back of the hall were those cham- 
bers of ours overlooking the garden of 
which I have already spoken, and another 
kitchen, less noble than the first, but still 
sufficiently grandiose to make most New 
World kitchens seem very meekly minute 
and unimpressive. Between the two kitch- 
ens was another court, with another cis- 
tern, from which the painter’s family drew 
water with a bucket on a long rope, which, 
when let down from the fourth story, ap- 
peared to be dropped from the clouds, and 
descended with a noise little less alarming 
than thunder. 

Altogether the most surprising object in 
the great sala was a sewing-machine, and 
we should have been inconsolably outraged 
by its presence there, amid so much that 


A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE. 195 

was merely venerable and beautiful, but 
for the fact that it was in a state of har- 
monious and hopeless disrepair, and, from 
its general contrivance, gave us the idea 
that it had never been of any use. It was, 
in fact, kept as a sort of curiosity by the 
landlord, who exhibited it to the admira- 
tion of his Venetian friends. 

The reader will doubtless have imagined, 
from what I have been saying, that the 
Palazzo Giustiniani had not all that ma- 
chinery which we know in our houses here 
as modern improvements. It had nothing 
of the kind, and life there was, as in most 
houses in Italy, a kind of permanent camp- 
ing out. When I remember the small 
amount of carpeting, of furniture, and of 
upholstery we enjoyed, it appears to me 
pathetic ; and yet, I am not sure that it 
was not the wisest way to live. I know 
that we had compensation in things not 
purchasable here for money. If the fur- 
niture of the principal bedroom was some- 


196 A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE 

what scanty, its dimensions were unstinted, 
the ceiling was fifteen feet high, and was 
divided into rich and heavy panels, adorned 
each with a mighty rosette of carved and 
gilded wood, two feet across. The parlor 
had not its original decorations in our time, 
but it had once had so noble a carved ceil- 
ino 1 that it was found worth while to take 
it down and sell it into England ; and it 
still had two grand Venetian mirrors, a 
vast and very good painting of a miracle of 
St. Anthony, and imitation-antique tables 
and arm-chairs. The last were frolicked 
all over with carven nymphs and cupids ; 
but they were of such frail construction 
that they were not meant to be sat in, 
much less to be removed from the wall 
against which they stood ; and more than 
one of our American visitors was dismayed 
at having these proud articles of furni- 
ture go to pieces upon his attempt to use 
them like mere arm-chairs of ordinary life. 
Scarcely less impressive or useless than 


A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE. 197 


these was a monumental plaster-stove, sur- 
mounted by a bust of iEsculapius ; when 
this was broken by accident, we cheaply 
repaired the loss w r ith a bust of Homer 
(the dealer in the next campo being out of 
jFsculapiuses) which no one could have 
told from the bust it replaced ; and this 
and the other artistic glories of the room 
made us quite forget all possible blemishes 
and defects. And will the reader mention 
any house with modern improvements in 
America which has also windows, with 
pointed arches of marble, opening upon 
balconies that overhang the Grand Canal ? 

For our new apartment, which consisted 
of six rooms, furnished with every article 
necessary for Venetian housekeeping, we 
paid one dollar a day, which, in the inno- 
cence of our hearts we thought rather 
dear, though we were somewhat consoled 
by reflecting that this extravagant outlay 
secured us the finest position on the Grand 
Canal. We did not mean to keep house 


198 A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE. 


as we bad in Casa Falier, and perhaps a 
sketch of our easier menage may not be 
out of place. Breakfast was prepared in 
the house, for in that blessed climate all 
you care for in the morning is a cup of 
coffee, with a little bread and butter, a 
musk-melon, and some clusters of white 
grapes, more or less. Then we had our 
dinners sent in warm from a cook’s who 
had learned his noble art in France ; he 
furnished a dinner of five courses for three 
persons at a cost of about eighty cents ; 
and they were dinners so happily conceived 
and so justly executed, that I cannot ac- 
cuse myself of an excess of sentiment 
when I confess that I sigh for them to this 
day. Then as for our immaterial tea, we 
always took that at the Caffe Florian in 
the Piazza of Saint Mark, where we drank 
a cup of black coffee and ate an ice, while 
all the world promenaded by, and the Aus- 
trian bands made heavenly music. 

Those bands no longer play in Venice, 


A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE. 199 

and I believe that they are not the only 
charm which she has lost in exchanging 
Austrian servitude for Italian freedom; 
though I should be sorry to think that 
freedom was not worth all other charms. 
The poor Venetians used to be very rigor- 
ous (as I have elsewhere related), about 
the music of their oppressors, and would 
not come into the Piazza until it had ceased 
and the Austrian promen aders had disap- 
peared, when they sat down at Florian’s, 
and listened to such bands of strolling 
singers and minstrels as chose to give 
them a concord of sweet sounds, without 
foreign admixture. We, in our neutrality, 
were wont to sit out both entertainments, 
and then go home well toward midnight, 
through the sleepy little streets, and over 
the bridges that spanned the narrow ca- 
nals, dreaming in the shadows of the pal- 
aces. 

We moved with half conscious steps till 
we came to the silver expanse of the Grand 


200 A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE. 


Canal, where, at the ferry, darkled a little 
brood of black gondolas, into one of which 
we got, and were rowed noiselessly to the 
thither side, where we took our way to- 
ward the land-gate of our palace through 
the narrow streets of the parish of San 
Barn aba, and the campo before the ugly fa- 
9ade of the church ; or else we were rowed 
directly to the water-gate, where we got 
out on the steps worn by the feet of the 
Giustiniani of old, and wandered upward 
through the darkness of the stairway, which 
gave them a far different welcome of serv- 
ants and lights when they returned from 
an evening’s pleasure in the Piazza. It 
seemed scarcely just ; but then, those Gius- 
tiniani were dead, and we were alive, and 
that was one advantage ; and besides, the 
loneliness and desolation of the palace had 
a peculiar charm, and were at any rate 
cheaper than its former splendor could 
have been. I am afraid that people who 
live abroad in the palaces of extinct nobles 


A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE. 201 


do not keep this important fact sufficiently 
in mind ; and as the Palazzo Giustiniani 
is still let in furnished lodgings, and it is 
quite possible that some of my readers 
may be going to spend next summer in it, 
I venture to remind them that if they have 
to draw somewhat upon their fancy for 
patrician accommodations there, it will cost 
them far less in money than it did the 
original proprietors, who contributed to 
our selfish pleasure by the very thought of 
their romantic absence and picturesque de- 
cay. In fact, the Past is everywhere like 
the cake of proverb : you cannot enjoy it 
and have it. 

And here I am reminded of another 
pleasure of modern dwellers in Venetian 
palaces, which could hardly have been in- 
dulged by the patricians of old, and which 
is hardly imaginable by people of this day, 
whose front doors open upon dry land : I 
mean to say the privilege of sea-bathing 
from one’s own threshold. From the be- 


202 A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE. 


ginning of June till far into September all 
the canals of Venice are populated by the 
amphibious boys, who clamor about in the 
brine, or poise themselves for a leap from 
the tops of bridges, or show their fine, stat- 
uesque figures, bronzed by the ardent sun, 
against the facades of empty palaces, where 
they hover among the marble sculptures, 
and meditate a headlong plunge. It is 
only the Venetian ladies, in fact, who do 
not share this healthful amusement. Fa- 
thers of families, like so many plump, 
domestic drakes, lead forth their aquatic 
broods, teaching the little ones to swim 
by the aid of various floats, and delighting 
in the gambols of the larger ducklings. 
When the tide comes in fresh and strong 
from the sea the water in the Grand Canal 
is pure and refreshing ; and at these times 
it is a singular pleasure to leap from one’s 
door-step into the swift current and spend 
a half-hour, very informally, among one’s 
neighbors there. The Venetian bathing- 


A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE. 203 


dress is a mere sketch of the pantaloons of 
ordinary life ; and when I used to stand 
upon our balcony, and see some bearded 
head ducking me a polite salutation from 
a pair of broad, brown shoulders that 
showed above the water, I was not always 
able to recognize my acquaintance, de- 
prived of his factitious identity of clothes. 
But I always knew a certain stately consul- 
general by a vast expanse of baldness upon 
the top of his head ; and it must be owned, 
I think, that this form of social assembly 
was, with all its disadvantages, a novel and 
vivacious spectacle. The Venetian ladies, 
when they bathed, went to the Lido, or 
else to the bath-houses in front of the 
Ducal Palace, where they saturated them- 
selves a good part of the day, and drank 
coffee, and, possibly, gossiped. 

I think that our balconies at Palazzo 
Giustiniani were even better places to see 
the life of the Grand Canal from than the 
balcony of Casa Falier, which we had just 


204 A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE. 


left. Here at least we had a greater 
stretch of the Canal, looking, as we could, 
up either side of its angle. Here, too, we 
had more gondola stations in sight, and as 
we were nearer the Rialto, there was more 
picturesque passing of the market-boats. 
But if we saw more of this life, we did 
not see it in greater variety, for I think we 
had already exhausted this. There was a 
movement all night long. If I woke at 
three or four o’clock, and offered myself 
the novel spectacle of the Canal at that 
hour, I saw the heavy-laden barges go by 
to the Rialto with now and then also a 
good-sized coasting schooner making lazily 
for the lagoons, with its ruddy fire already 
kindled for cooking the morning’s meal, 
and looking very enviably cosey. After 
our own breakfast we began to watch for 
the gondolas of the tourists of different na- 
tions, whom we came to distinguish at a 
glance. Then the boats of the various 
artisans went by, the carpenter’s, the ma- 


A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE. 205 


son’s, the plasterer’s, with those that sold 
fuel, and vegetables and fruit, and fish, to 
any household that arrested them. From 
noon till three or four o’clock the Canal 
was comparatively deserted ; but before 
twilight it was thronged again by people 
riding out in their open gondolas to take 
the air after the day’s fervor. After night- 
fall they ceased, till only at long intervals 
a solitary lamp, stealing over the dark sur- 
face, gave token of the movement of some 
gondola bent upon an errand that could 
not fail to seem mysterious or fail to be 
matter of fact. We never wearied of this 
oft-repeated variety, nor of our balcony in 
any way ; and when the moon shone in 
through the lovely arched window and 
sketched its exquisite outline on the floor, 
we were as happy as moonshine could 
make us. 

Were we otherwise content? As con- 
cerns Venice, it is very hard to say, and I 
do not know that I shall ever be able to 


206 A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE. 

say with certainty. For all the entertain- 
ment it afforded us, it was a very lonely 
life, and we felt the sadness of the city in 
many fine and not instantly recognizable 
ways. Englishmen who lived there bade 
us beware of spending the whole year in 
Venice, which they declared apt to result 
in a morbid depression of the spirits. I 
believe they attributed this to the air of the 
place, but 1 think it was more than half 
owing to her mood, to her old, ghostly, 
aimless life. She was, indeed, a phantom 
of the past, haunting our modern world, — 
serene, inexpressibly beautiful, yet inscrut- 
ably and unspeakably sad. Remembering 
the charm that was in her, we often sigh 
for the renewal of our own vague life 
there, — a shadow within the shadow ; 
but remembering also her deep melan- 
choly, an involuntary shiver creeps over us, 
and we are glad not to be there. Perhaps 
some of you who have spent a summer day 
or a summer week in Venice do not recog- 


A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE. 207 


nize this feeling ; but if you will remain 
there, not four years as we did, but a year 
or six months even, it will ever afterwards 
be only too plain. All changes, all events, 
were affected by the inevitable local mel- 
ancholy; the day was as pensive amidst 
that populous silence as the night ; the 
winter not more pathetic than the long, 
tranquil, lovely summer. We rarely sen- 
timentalized consciously, and still more 
seldom openly, about the present state of 
Venice as contrasted with her past glory. 
I am glad to say that we despised the con- 
ventional poetastery about her ; but I be- 
lieve that we had so far lived into sympa- 
thy with her, that, whether we realized it 
or not, we took the tone of her dispirited- 
ness, and assumed a part of the common 
experience of loss and of hopelessness. 
History, if you live where it was created, 
is a far subtler influence than you sus- 
pect; and I would not say how much Vene- 
tian history, amidst the monuments of her 


208 A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE. 


glory and the witnesses of her fall, had to 
do in secret and tacit ways with the pre- 
vailing sentiment of existence, which I 
now distinctly recognize to have been a 
melancholy one. No doubt this sentiment 
was deepened by every freshly added asso- 
ciation with memorable places ; and each 
fact, each great name and career, each 
strange tradition as it rose out of the past 
for us and shed its pale lustre upon the 
present, touched us with a pathos which 
we could neither trace nor analyze. 

I do not know how much the modem 
Venetians had to do with this impression, 
but something I have no question. They 
were then under Austrian rule ; and in 
spite of much that was puerile and theat- 
rical in it, there was something very affect- 
ing in their attitude of what may best be 
described as passive defiance. This alone 
made them heroic, but it also made them 
tedious. They rarely talked of anything 
but politics ; and as I have elsewhere said, 


A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE. 209 

they were very jealous to have every one 
declare himself of their opinion. Hemmed 
in by this jealousy on one side, and by a 
heavy and rebellious sense of the wrongful 
presence of the Austrian troops and the 
Austrian spies on the other, we forever 
felt dimly constrained by something, we 
could not say precisely what, and we only 
knew \^hat, when we went sometimes on a 
journey into free Italy, and threw off the 
irksome caution we had maintained both 
as to patriotic and alien tyrants. This po- 
litical misery circumscribed our acquaint- 
ance very much, and reduced the circle of 
our friendship to three or four families, 
who were content to know our sympathies 
without exacting constant expression of 
them. So we learned to depend mainly 
upon passing Americans for our society ; 
we hailed with rapture the arrival of a 
gondola distinguished by the easy hats of 
our countrymen and the pretty faces and 
pretty dresses of our countrywomen. It 


210 A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE. 


was in the da^ T s of our war ; and talking 
together over its events, we felt a brother- 
hood with every other American. 

Of course, in these circumstances, we 
made thorough acquaintance with the peo- 
ple about us in the palace. The landlord 
had come somehow into a profitable knowl- 
edge of Anglo-Saxon foibles and suscepti- 
bilities ; but his lodgings were charming, 
and I recognize the principle that it is not 
for literature to make its prey of any pos- 
sibly conscious object. For this reason, I 
am likewise mostly silent concerning a 
certain attache of the palace, the right- 
hand man and intimate associate of the 
landlord. lie was the descendant of one 
of the most ancient and noble families of 
Italy, — a family of popes and cardinals, 
of princes and ministers, which in him 
was diminished and tarnished in an almost 
inexplicable degree. He was not at all 
worldly-wise, but he was a man of great 
learning, and of a capacity for acquiring 


A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE. 211 


knowledge that I have never seen sur- 
passed. He possessed, I think, not many 
shirts on earth ; but he spoke three or four 
languages, and wrote very pretty sonnets 
in Italian and German. He was one of 
the friendliest and willingest souls living, 
and as generous as utter destitution can 
make a man ; yet he had a proper spirit, 
and valued himself upon his name. Some- 
times he brought his great-grandfather to 
the palace ; a brisk old gentleman in his 
nineties, who had seen the fall of the Re- 
public and three other revolutions in Ven- 
ice, but had contrived to keep a govern- 
ment pension through all, and now smiled 
with unabated cheerfulness upon a world 
which he seemed likely never to leave. 

The palace-servants were two, the gon- 
dolier and a sort of housekeeper, — a hand- 
some, swarthy woman, with beautiful white 
teeth and liquid black eyes. She was the 
mother of a pretty little boy, who was going 
to bring himself up for a priest, and whose 


212 A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE. 


chief amusement was saying mimic masses 
to an imaginary congregation. She was 
perfectly statuesque and obliging, and we 
had no right, as lovers of the beautiful or 
as lodgers, to complain of her, whatever 
her faults might have been. As to the 
gondolier, who was a very important per- 
sonage in our palatial household, he was a 
handsome, bashful, well-mannered fellow, 
with a good-natured blue eye and a neatly 
waxed mustache. He had been ten years 
a soldier in the Austrian army, and was, 
from his own account and from all I saw 
of him, one of the least courageous men in 
the world ; but then no part of the Aus- 
trian system tends to make men brave, and 
I could easity imagine that before it had 
done with one it might give him reasons 
enough to be timid all the rest of his life. 
Piero had not very much to do, and he 
spent the greater part of his leisure in a 
sort of lazy flirtation with the women about 
the kitchen-fire, or in the gondola, in which 


A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE. 213 


he sometimes gave them the air. We al- 
ways liked him ; I should have trusted 
him in any sort of way, except one that 
involved danger. It once happened that 
burglars attempted to enter our rooms, and 
Piero declared to us that he knew the 
men ; but before the police, he swore that 
lie knew nothing about them. Afterwards 
he returned privately to his first assertion, 
and accounted for his conduct by saying 
that if he had borne witness against the 
burglars, he was afraid that their friends 
would jump on his back ( snltormi adosso ), 
as he phrased it, in the dark ; for by this 
sort of terrorism the poor and the wicked 
have long been bound together in Italy. 
Piero was a humorist in his dry way, and 
made a jest of his own caution ; but his 
favorite joke was, when he dressed him- 
self with particular care, to tell the women 
that he was going to pay a visit to the 
Princess Clary, then the star of Austrian 
society. This mild pleasantry was repeated 
indefinitely with never failing effect. 


214 A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE. 

More interesting to us than all the rest 
was our own servant, Bettina, who came 
to us from a village on the main-land. She 
was very dark, so dark and so Southern in 
appearance as almost to verge upon the 
negro type ; yet she bore the English- 
sounding name of Scarbro, and how she 
ever came by it remains a puzzle to this 
day, for she was one of the most pure and 
entire of Italians. I mean this was her 
maiden name ; she was married to a trum- 
peter in the Austrian service, whose Bo- 
hemian name she was unable to pronounce, 
and consequently never gave us. She was 
a woman of very few ideas indeed, but 
perfectly honest and good-hearted. She 
was pious, in her peasant fashion, and in 
her walks about the city did not fail to 
bless the baby before every picture of the 
Madonna. She provided it with an en- 
graved portrait of that Holy Nail which 
was venerated in the neighboring church 
of San Pantaleou ; and she apparently 


A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE. 215 

aimed to supply it with playthings of a re- 
ligious and saving character like that piece 
of ivory, which resembled a small torso, 
and which Bettina described as “ A bit of 
the Lord, Signor,” — and it was, in fact, a 
fragment of an ivory crucifix, which she 
had somewhere picked up. To Bettina’s 
mind, mankind broadly divided themselves 
into two races, Italians and Germans, to 
which latter she held that we Americans 
in some sort belonged. She believed that 
America lay a little to the south of Vienna, 
and in her heart I think she was persuaded 
that the real national complexion was 
black, and that the innumerable white 
Americans she saw at our house were 
merely a multitude of exceptions. But 
with all her ignorance, she had no super- 
stitions of a gloomy kind : the only ghost 
she seemed ever to have heard of was the 
spectre of an American ship captain which 
a friend of Piero’s had seen at the Lido. 
She was perfectly kind and obedient, and 


216 A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE. 


was deeply attached in an inarticulate way 
to the baby, which was indeed the pet of 
the whole palace. This young lady ruled 
arbitrarily over them all, and was forever 
being kissed and adored. When Piero 
went out to the wine-shop for a little tem- 
perate dissipation, he took her with him 
on his shoulder, and exhibited her to the 
admiring gondoliers of his acquaintance ; 
there was no puppet-show, no church fes- 
tival, in that region to which she was not 
carried ; and when Bettina, and Giulia, 
and all the idle women of the neighbor- 
hood assembled on a Saturday afternoon 
in the narrow alley behind the palace 
(where they dressed one another’s thick 
black hair in fine braids soaked in milk, 
and built it up to last the whole of the 
next week), the baby was the cynosure of 
all hearts and eyes. But her supremacy 
was yet more distinguished when, late at 
night, the household gave itself a feast of 
snails stewed in oil and garlic, in the vast 


A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE. 217 

Kitchen. There her anxious parents have 
found her seated in the middle of the table 
with the bowl of snails before her, and 
armed with a great spoon, while her vas- 
sals sat round, and grinned their fondness 
and delight in her small tyrannies ; and 
the immense room, dimly lit, with the 
mystical implements of cookery glimmer- 
ing from the wall, showed like some witch’s 
cavern, where a particularly small sorcer- 
ess was presiding over the concoction of 
an evil potion or the weaving of a power- 
ful spell. 

From time to time we had fellow-lodg- 
ers, who were always more or less inter- 
esting and mysterious. Among the rest 
there was once a French lady, who lan- 
guished, during her stay, under the dis- 
favor of the police, and for whose sake 
there was a sentinel with a fixed bayonet 
stationed day and night at the palace gate. 
At last, one night, this French lady es- 
caped by a rope-ladder from her chamber 


218 A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE. 


window, and thus no doubt satisfied alike 
the female instinct for intrigue and elope- 
ment and the political agitator’s love of a 
mysterious disappearance. It was under- 
stood dimly that she was an author, and 
had written a book displeasing to the po- 
lice. 

Then there was the German baroness 
and her son and daughter, the last very 
beautiful and much courted by handsome 
Austrian officers; the son rather weak- 
minded, and a great care to his sister and 
mother, from his propensity to fall in love 
and marry below his station ; the mother 
very red-faced and fat, a good-natured old 
creature who gambled the summer months 
away at Ilombourg and Baden, and in the 
winter resorted to Venice to make a match 
for her pretty daughter. 

Then, moreover, there was that English 
family, between whom and ourselves there 
was the reluctance and antipathy, personal 
and national, which exists between all right- 


A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE. 219 

minded Englishmen and Americans. No 
Italian can understand this just and nat- 
ural condition, and it was the constant aim 
of our landlord to make us acquainted. 
So one day when he found a member of 
each of these unfriendly families on the 
neutral ground of the grand sala , he in- 
troduced them. They had, happily, the 
piano-forte between them, and I flatter 
myself that the insulting coldness and in- 
difference with which they received each 
other’s names carried to our landlord’s bo- 
som a dismay never before felt by a good- 
natured and well-meaning man. 

The piano-forte which I have mentioned 
belonged to the landlord, who was fond of 
music and of all fine and beautiful things ; 
and now and then he gave a musical soiree, 
which was attended, more or less surrep- 
titiously, by the young people of his ac- 
quaintance. I do not think he was always 
quite candid in giving his invitations, for 
on one occasion a certain count, who had 


220 A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE. 


taken refuge from the glare of the sola in 
our parlor for the purpose of concealing 
the very loud-plaided pantaloons he wore, 
explained pathetically that he had no idea 
it was a party, and that he had been so 
long out of society, for patriotic reasons, 
that he had no longer a dress suit. But 
to us they were very delightful entertain- 
ments, no less from the great variety of 
character they afforded than from the really 
charming and excellent music which the 
different amateurs made ; for we had airs 
from all the famous operas, and the in- 
strumentation was by a gifted young com- 
poser. Besides, the gayety seemed to re- 
call in some degree the old, brilliant life 
of the palace, and at least showed us how 
well it was adapted to social magnificence 
and display. 

We enjoyed our whole year in Palazzo 
Giustiniani, though some of the days were 
too long and some too short, as every- 
where. From heat we hardly suffered at 


A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE. 221 


all, so perfectly did the vast and lofty 
rooms answer to the purpose of their build- 
ers in this respect. A current of sea air 
drew through to the painter’s garden by 
day ; and by night there was scarcely a 
mosquito of the myriads that infested some 
parts of Venice. In winter it was not so 
well. Then we shuffled about in wadded 
gowns and boots lined with sheep-skin, — 
the woolly side in, as in the song. The 
passage of the sala was something to be 
dreaded, and we shivered as fleetly through 
it as we could, and were all the colder for 
the deceitful warmth of the colors which 
the sun cast upon the stone floor from the 
window opening on the court. 

I do not remember any one event of 
our life more exciting than that attempted 
burglary of which I have spoken. In a 
city where the police gave their best atten- 
tion to political offenders, there were nat- 
urally a great many rogues, and the Vene- 
tian rogues, if not distinguished for the 


222 A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE. 


more heroic crimes, were very skillful in 
what I may call the genre branch of rob- 
bing rooms through open windows, and 
committing all kinds of safe domestic dep- 
redations. It was judged best to acquaint 
Justice (fis they call law in Latin coun- 
tries) with the attempt upon our property, 
and I found her officers housed in a small 
room of the Doge’s Palace, clerkly men in 
velvet skull-caps, driving loath quills over 
the rough official paper of those regions. 
After an exchange of diplomatic courtesies, 
the commissary took my statement of the 
affair down in writing, pertinent to which 
were my father’s name, place, and busi- 
ness, with a full and satisfactory personal 
history of myself down to the period of 
the attempted burglary. This, I said, oc- 
curred one morning about daylight, when 1 
saw the head of the burglar peering above 
the window-sill, and the hand of the burg- 
lar extended to prey upon my wardrobe. 

“ Excuse me, Signor Console,” inter- 


A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE. 223 

rupted the commissary, “ how could you 
see him ? ” 

“ Why, there was nothing in the world 
to prevent me. The window was open.” 

“ The window was open ! ” gasped the 
commissary. “ Do you mean that you 
sleep with your windows open?” 

“ Most certainly ! ” 

“ Pardon ! ” said the commissary, suspi- 
ciously. “ Do all Americans sleep with 
their windows open ? ” 

“I may venture to say that they all do, 
in summer,” I answered ; “ at least, it ’s 
the general custom.” 

Such a thinor as this indulgence in fresh 
air, seemed altogether foreign to the com- 
missary’s experience ; and but for my offi- 
cial dignity, I am sure that I should have 
been effectually browbeaten by him. As 
it was, he threw himself back in his arm- 
chair and stared at me fixedly for some 
moments. Then he recovered himself with 
another “ Perdoni ! ” and, turning to his 


224 A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE. 


clerk, said, “ Write down that, according 
to the American custom , they were sleeping 
with their windows open.” But I know 
that the commissary, for all his politeness, 
considered this habit a relic of the times 
when we Americans all abode in wigwams ; 
and I suppose it paralyzed his energies in 
the effort to bring the burglars to justice, 
for I have never heard anything of them 
from that day to this. 

The truth is, it was a very uneventful 
year ; and I am the better satisfied with it 
as an average Venetian year on that ac- 
count. We sometimes varied the pensive 
monotony by a short visit to the cities of 
the main-land ; but we always came back 
to it willingly, and I think we uncon- 
sciously abhorred any interruption of it. 
The days, as they followed each other, were 
wonderfully alike, in every respect. For 
eight months of summer they were alike 
in their clear-skied, sweet-breathed loveli- 
ness ; in the autumn, there where the mel- 


A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE. 225 


ancholy of the falling leaf could not spread 
its contagion to the sculptured foliage of 
Gothic art, the days were alike in their 
sentiment of tranquil oblivion and resig- 
nation which was as autumnal as any as- 
pect of woods or fields could have been ; 
in the winter they were alike in their 
dreariness and discomfort. As I remem- 
ber, we spent by far the greater part of 
our time in going to the Piazza, and we 
were devoted Florianisti, as the Italians 
call those that lounge habitually at the 
Caffe Florian. We went every evening 
to the Piazza as a matter of course ; if the 
morning was long, we went to the Piazza ; 
if we did not know what to do with the 
afternoon, we went to the Piazza ; if we 
had friends with us, we went to the Pi- 
azza; if we were alone, we went to the 
Piazza ; and there was no mood or cir- 
cumstances in which it did not seem a nat- 
ural and fitting thing to go to the Piazza. 
There were all the prettiest shops ; there 


226 A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE. 


were all the finest caffes ; there was the 
incomparable Church of St. Mark ; there 
was the whole world of Venice. 

Of course, we had other devices besides 
going to the Piazza ; and sometimes we 
spent entire weeks in visiting the churches, 
one after another, and studying their ar- 
tistic treasures, down to the smallest scrap 
of an old master in their darkest chapel ; 
their history, their storied tombs, their 
fictitious associations. Very few churches 
escaped, I believe, except such as had been 
turned into barracks, and were guarded by 
an incorruptible Austrian sentinel. For 
such churches as did escape, we have a 
kind of envious longing to this day, and 
should find it hard to like anybody who 
had succeeded better in visiting them. 
Tire re is, for example, the Church of San 
Giobbe, the doors of which we haunted 
with more patience than that of the titu- 
lary saint: now the sacristan was out; 
now the church was shut up for repairs ; 


A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE. 227 


now it was Holy Week and the pictures 
were veiled ; we had to leave Venice at 
last without a sight of San Giobbe’s 
three Saints by Bordone, and Madonna by- 
Bellini, which, unseen, outvalue all the 
other Saints and Madonnas that we looked 
at ; atid I am sure that life can never be- 
come so aimless, but we shall still have 
the desire of some day going to see the 
church of San Giobbe. If we read some 
famous episode of Venetian history, we 
made it the immediate care of our lives to 
visit the scene of its occurrence ; if Ruskin 
told us of some recondite beauty of sculpt- 
ure hid away in some un though t-of palace 
court, we invaded that palace at once ; if 
in entirely purposeless strolls through the 
city, we came upon anything that touched 
the fancy or piqued curiosity, there was 
no gate or bar proof against our bribes. 
What strange old nests of ruin, x what mar- 
velous homes of solitude and dilapidation, 
did we not wander into ! What boarded- 


228 A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE. 


up windows peer through, what gloomy 
recesses penetrate ! I have lumber enough 
in my memory stored from such rambles 
to load the night-mares of a generation, 
and stuff for the dreams of a whole people. 
Does any gentleman or lady wish to write 
a romance? Sir or madam, I know just 
the mouldy and sunless alley for your vil- 
lain to stab his victim in, the canal in 
which to plunge his body, the staircase 
and the hall for the subsequent wander- 
ings of his ghost; and all these scenes and 
localities I will sell at half the cost price ; 
as also, balconies for flirtation, gondolas 
for intrigue and elopement, confessionals 
for the betrayal of guilty secrets. I have 
an assortment of bad and beautiful faces 
and picturesque attitudes and effective tones 
of voice ; and a large stock of sympathetic 
sculptures and furniture and dresses, with 
other articles too numerous to mention, all 
warranted Venetian, and suitable to every 
style of romance. Who bids ? Nay, I 


A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE. 229 

cannot sell, nor you buy. Each memory, 
as I hold it up for inspection, ltfses its sub- 
tle beauty and value, and turns common 
and poor in my hawker’s fingers. 

Yet I must needs try to fix here the 
remembrance of two or three palaces, of 
which our fancy took the fondest hold, 
and to which it yet most fondly clings. 
It cannot locate them all, and least of all 
can it place that vast old palace, some- 
where near Cannaregio, which faced upon 
a campo, with lofty windows blinded by 
rough boards, and empty from top to bot- 
tom. It was of the later Renaissance in 
style, and we imagined it built in the Re- 
public’s declining years by some ruinous 
noble, whose extravagance forbade his pos- 
terity to live in it, for it had that pecul- 
iarly forlorn air which belongs to a thing 
decayed without being worn out. We en- 
tered its coolness and dampness, and wan- 
dered up the wide marble staircase, past 
the vacant niches of departed statuary, and 


230 A YEAR IN A VENETIAN- PALACE. 


came on the third floor to a grand portal 
which was closed against us by a barrier 
of lumber. But this could not hinder us 
from looking within, and we were aware 
that we stood upon the threshold of our ru- 
inous noble’s great banqueting-hall, where 
he used to give his magnificent feste da 
hallo. Lustrissimo was long gone with all 
his guests ; but there in the roof were the 
amazing frescos of Tiepolo’s school, which 
had smiled down on them, as now they 
smiled on us ; great piles of architecture, 
airy tops of palaces, swimming in summer 
sky, and wantoned over by a joyous popu- 
lace of divinities of the lovelier sex that 
had nothing but their loveliness to clothe 
them and keep them afloat; the whole 
grandiose and superb beyond the effect of 
words, and luminous with delicious color. 
How it all rioted there with its inextin- 
guishable beauty in the solitude and si- 
lence, from day to day, from year to year, 
while men died, and systems passed, and 


A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE. 231 


nothing remained unchanged but the in- 
stincts of youth and love .that inspired it ! 
It was music and wine and wit ; it was so 
warm and glowing that it made the sun- 
light cold ; and it seemed ever after a se- 
cret of gladness and beauty that the sad 
old palace was keeping in its heart against 
the time to which Venice looks forward 
when her splendor and opulence shall be 
indestructibly renewed. 

There is a ball-room in the Palazzo Pi- 
sani, which some of my readers may have 
passed through on their way to the studio 
of the charming old Prussian painter, 
Nerly ; the frescos of this are dim and 
faded and dusty, and impress you with a 
a sense of irreparable decay, but the noble 
proportions and the princely air of the 
place are inalienable while the palace 
stands. Here might have danced that Con- 
tarini who, Avhen his wife’s necklace of 
pearls fell upon the floor in the way of 
her partner, the king of Denmark, ad- 


232 A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE. 

vanced and ground it into powder with his 
foot that the king might not be troubled 
to avoid treading on it ; and here, doubt- 
less, many a gorgeous masquerade had 
been in the long Venetian carnival; and 
what passion and intrigue and jealousy, 
who knows ? Now the palace was let in 
apartments, and was otherwise a barrack, 
and in the great court, steadfast as any 
of the marble statues, stood the Austrian 
sentinel. One of the statues was a figure 
veiled from head to foot, at the base of 
which it was hard not to imagine lovers, 
masked and hooded, and forever hurriedly 
whispering their secrets in the shadow cast 
in perpetual moonlight. 

Yet another ball-room in yet another 
palace opens to memory, but this is all 
bright and fresh with recent decoration. 
In the blue vaulted roof shine stars of 
gold; the walls are gay with dainty fres- 
cos ; a gallery encircles the whole, and 
from this drops a light stairway, slim- 


A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE. 233 

railed, and guarded at the foot by torch- 
bearing statues of swarthy Eastern girls ; 
through the glass doors at the other side 
glimmers the green and red of a garden. 
It was a place to be young in, to dance in, 
dream in, make love in ; but it was no 
more a surprise than the whole palace 
to which it belonged, and which there in 
that tattered and poverty-stricken old Ven- 
ice was a vision of untarnished splendor 
and prosperous fortune. It was richly 
furnished throughout all its vast extent, 
adorned with every caprice and delight of 
art, and appointed with every modern com- 
fort. The foot was hushed by costly car- 
pets, the eye was flattered by a thousand 
beauties and prettinesses. In the grates 
the fires were laid and ready to be lighted ; 
the candles stood upon the mantels; the 
toilet-linen was arranged for instant use in 
the luxurious chambers ; but from base- 
ment to roof the palace was a solitude ; no 
guest came there, no one dwelt there save 


234 A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE. 


the custodian ; the eccentric lady of whose 
possessions it formed a part abode in a lit- 
tle house behind the palace, and on her 
door-plate had written her vanitas vanita- 
tum in the sarcastic inscription, “ John 
Humdrum, Esquire.” 

Of course she was Inglese ; and that 
other lady, who was selling off the furni- 
ture of her palace, and was so amiable a 
guide to its wonders in her curious broken 
English, was Hungarian. Her great pride 
and joy, amidst the objects of 4 vertu and 
the works of art, was a set of “ Punch,” 
which she made us admire, and which she 
prized the more because she had always 
been allowed to receive it when the gov- 
ernment prohibited it to everybody else. 
But we were Americans, she said ; and had 
we ever seen this book ? She held up “ The 
Potiphar Papers,” a volume which must 
have been inexpressibly amused and bewil- 
dered to find itself there, in that curious 
little old lady’s hand. 


A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE. 235 


Shall I go on and tell of the palace 

in which our strange friend Padre L 

dwelt, and the rooms of which he had 
filled up with the fruits of his passion for 
the arts and sciences : the anteroom he 
had frescoed to represent a grape-arbor 
with a multitude of clusters overhead ; the 
parlor with his oil-paintings on the walls, 
and the piano and melodeon arranged so 

that Padre L could play upon them 

both at once; the oratory turned forge, 
and harboring the most alchemic-looking 
apparatus of all kinds; the other rooms in 
which he had stored his inventions in port- 
able furniture, steam-propulsion, rifled can- 
non, and perpetual motion ; the attic with 
the camera by which one could photograph 
one’s self, —shall I tell of this, and yet 
other palaces? I think there is enough al- 
ready ; and I have begun to doubt some- 
what the truth of my reminiscences, as I 
advise the reader to do. 

Besides^ I feel that the words fail to* 


236 A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE. 


give all the truth that is in them ; and if 
I cannot make them serve my purpose as 
to the palaces, how should I hope to im- 
part through them my sense of the glory 
and loveliness of Venetian art ? I could 
not give the imagination and the power of 
Tintoretto as we felt it, nor the serene 
beauty, the gracious luxury of Titian, nor 
the opulence, the worldly magnificence 
of Paolo Veronese. There hamr their 
mighty works forever, high above the 
reach of any palaverer ; they smile their 
stately welcome from the altars and palace- 
walls, upon whoever approaches them in 
the sincerity and love of beauty that pro- 
duced them; and thither you must thus go 
if you would know them. Like fragments 
of dreams, like the fleeting 

“ Images of glimmering dawn,” 

I am from time to time aware, amid the 
work-day world, of some happiness from 
them, some face or form, some drift of a 
princely robe or ethereal drapery, some 


A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE. 237 


august shape of painted architecture, some 
unnamable delight of color ; but to de- 
scribe them more strictly and explicitly, 
how should I undertake ? 

There was the exhaustion following 
every form of intense pleasure, in their 
contemplation, such a wear of vision and 
thought, that I could not call the life we 
led in looking at them an idle one, even if 
it had no result in after times ; so I will 
not say that it was to severer occupation 
our minds turned more and more in our 
growing desire to return home. For my 
own part personally I felt keenly the ficti- 
tious and transitory character of official 
life. I knew that if I had become fit to 
serve the government by four years’ resi- 
dence in Venice, that was a good reason 
why the government, according to our ad- 
mirable system, should dismiss me, and 
send some perfectly unqualified person 
to take my place ; and in my heart also 
I knew that there was almost nothing 


238 A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE. 


for me to do where I was, and I dreaded 
the easily formed habit of receiving a sal- 
ary for no service performed. I reminded 
myself that, soon or late, I must go back 
to the old fashion of earning money, and 
that it had better be sooner than later. 
Therefore, though for some reasons it was 
the saddest and strangest thing in the 
world to do, I was on the whole rejoiced 
when a leave of absence came and we pre- 
pared to quit Venice. 

Never had the city seemed so dream- 
like and unreal as in this light of farewell, 
— this tearful glimmer which our love and 
regret cast upon it. As in a maze, we 
haunted once more and for the last time 
the scenes we had known so long, and 
spent our final, phantasmal evening in the 
Piazza ; looked, through the moonlight, 
our mute adieu to islands and lagoons, to 
church and tower; and then returned to 
our own palace, and stood long upon the 
balconies that overhung the Grand Canal. 


A YEAR IN A VENETIAN PALACE. 239 


There the future became as incredible and 
improbable as the past ; and if we had 
often felt the incongruity of our coming to 
live in such a place, now, with tenfold 
force, we felt the cruel absurdity of pro- 
posing to live anywhere else. We had 
become part of Venice ; and how could 
such atoms of her fantastic personality 
ever mingle with the alien and unsym- 
pathetic world ? 

The next morning the whole palace 
household bestirred itself to accompany us 
to the station : the landlord in his best hat 
and coat, our noble friend in phenomenal 
linen, Giulia and her little boy, Bettina 
shedding bitter tears over the baby, and 
Piero, sad but firm, bending over the oar 
and driving us swiftly forward. The first 
turn of the Canal shut the Palazzo Giusti- 
niani from our lingering gaze, a few more 
curves and windings brought us to the sta- 
tion. The tickets were bought, the bag- 
gage was registered; the little oddly as- 


240 A YEAR & A VENETIAN PALACE. 

sorted company drew itself up in a line, 
and received with tears our husky adieux. 
I feared there might be a remote purpose 
in the hearts of the landlord and his re- 
tainer to embrace and kiss me, after the 
Italian manner, but if there was, by a final 
inspiration they spared me the ordeal. 
Piero turned away to his gondola ; the 
two other men moved aside ; Bettina gave 
one long, hungering devouring hug to the 
baby ; and as we hurried into the waiting- 
room, we saw her, as upon a stage, stand- 
ing without the barrier, supported and sob- 
bing in the arms of Giulia. 

It was well to be gone, but I cannot say 
we were glad to be going. 



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